KL @kl@mastodon.sdf.org

last night I learned you can actually have a panic attack while sleeping and wake up in the middle of it! so that's cool.

I get that internal combustion engines are bad and their days are numbered, but I remain unconvinced that everyone driving around on top of giant lithium batteries disguised as car underbodies is a better outcome environmentally.

I feel like that makes me a bit of a Luddite, which is a new place for me to be. Pynchon told me it's OK to be one. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

Went down a Mac programming reading rabbithole that ended up with me installing Free Pascal and Lazarus on my laptop.

The obvious response here is “well, write one, then,” and if I weren’t so wrapped up in this manuscript right now maybe I’d try.

I wish there were a version of MORE 3.1 that ran on modern platforms. I feel like people, especially writers, who haven’t used old Mac outliners don’t know what they’re missing.

I’ve done a LOT of writing since I hit on my Mac Word 5 setup a few weeks ago. Only problem now is the carpal tunnel issues that have been slowly gaining on me for years are finally too obvious to ignore, I guess because of all the extra time I’m spending typing on top of my work days, and my crappy work from home desk setup.

On the bright side maybe I’ll get to buy another fancy ergo keyboard?

I misplaced the flash drive with my System 7 writing environment on it before I could back up yesterday's work and so I've lost about 900 words. Feel like scrapping the whole project instead of trying to re-trace my steps. The perils of working in emulators across work and personal machines.

Every couple months something comes over me and I think, “I should really buy an AK-47.” It passes quickly.

There is nothing so terrible for my self-esteem as reading fiction I'm in the middle of writing.

The Classic Mac is very welcoming in its way. Even MacOS 8/9 still retains it but not to the same degree.

I don’t know if it’s the familiarity of the environment from growing up in a Mac household, or the scaled back simplicity of the writing tools (compared to O365 and Emacs and whatever else I’ve been writing in), but I find myself really enjoying working this way.

I’ve got WordPerfect, MacWrite Pro, and Nisus Writer here as well, but they haven’t tempted me away from Word 5.1 yet.

Roughly a week into working on a big writing project in Word 5 on System 7.

It’s definitely not perfect, but all of the landmines I’ve stepped on so far were the same ones I remember from being a kid on our family Performa.

The nice thing about using Mac System 7 for writing is that eventually you get a “This application cannot launch. Error -192” just like in The Good Old Days and have to reinstall stuff.

If you're feeling a bit masochistic and really looking for a minimalist writing environment, Word 4 has been right there since 1989

I had totally forgotten how weird and cool UserLand Frontier is. The Mac had so many interesting outliners.

All this has me considering keeping an emulator and a few disk images on a flash drive and just dropping into my Mac writing happy place whenever the mood strikes me, regardless of what computer I’m using. Edit my files from anywhere because they’re all inside a fake computer from 30 years ago.

Once you tell Trust Center not to block them, up to date Word from Office 365 has no problem at all opening files I create in Word 5 (from 1992) running on System 7. Kind of amazing, kind of terrifying.

I'm deep down the rabbithole of playing with classic Mac writing tools. Word 5 is still probably my favorite version.

Just remembered the summer in high school (2004 maybe?) when I somehow got hold of a PowerBook 180 and churned out a big masterpiece of fiction (so I thought) in Word 5. That’s probably the best writing experience I’ve had and I think the hardware and software had something to do with it. I’ve been searching for that feeling ever since.