Tmux, likewise, is entirely unknown to me, and I do not go CTRL-b c when I want a tab in a browser.
Nethack on the other hand, doesn’t count. It’s not procrastination. It’s… um… I’m solving problems in my head while appearing to waste my time.
(It still beats having notifications and things popping up all the time.)
Sounds mental. That said I’m a big fan of freewriting to get myself going and also of pomodoro technique (and I use the browser tools) though in reality it’s not to save me from the Internet but really for the timer to make me get up and walk for water. And that’s not even to make me take the break but really to make me not waste time when it’s time to write again.
Better for you, sure.
This is an oddly divisive device, and has been from practically the moment Astrohaus launched the Kickstarter. Most of the criticism I’ve read reduces to “It doesn’t do what it wasn’t designed to do, and therefore it’s a dumb idea,” usually accompanied by healthy dollop of A hipster fool and his money…
It’s a typewriter that saves drafts to cloud services. That’s all it does. If you want a word processor, by all means, get an old laptop and air gap it.
I’ve got one. It does what I want it to do - I draft on it, and edit in Word later. I like the keyboard (which you can’t get on any laptop at this price). It is absolutely a pain in the ass to edit on, which is exactly what I wanted - forward momentum, little temptation to edit while writing, which is so easy to do on a word processor. It was an easy way to change my writing process, and that alone was worth the money I spent on it in the first round.
The fact that we have more computational resources at our fingertips than most nation states had in the '70s and '80s; but run operating systems and software substantially designed by companies whose survival depends on distracting us is(along with crypto-bootloaders and tivoization) is one of those things that makes mere cyberpunk dystopias feel like escapist fantasy some days.
(And let’s not even start on the people who propose that the ‘digital divide’ has been conquered by the fact that content-consumption advertisement devices are now cheap; because those are almost the same as computers…)
While I suspect that they had limited options(e-ink has atrocious latency; but going LCD probably would have been substantially more power hungry unless they could get some, at this point fairly esoteric, large character LCD with nice transreflective sunlight readability; not exactly a mass market part); that seems like a fairly severe limitation, even by the standards of ‘intentionally limited’.
You’re right, it is a severe limitation. Which is what I wanted. Draft, then edit. Think of it like this: how easy is it to edit a typo you made a paragraph back, on a typewriter? How easy is it to move a block of text on a typewriter? Would you criticize a typewriter’s limitations because it can’t do those things easily, if that’s not what you wanted from it as a machine?
This is for writing, not editing. The advent of computer-assisted writing tools conflated those two processes, to the point that for many people they’ve become the same thing (particularly for those who’ve never written on anything but a computer). Which is fine, if that’s what works for you. As for me, I learned how to type in the fourth grade, grew up writing on typewriters, made the move to word processors in 1989 (PFS Write, WordPerfect, then Word), and never looked back. Aided by those tools, I integrated editing into my writing. Over time, that became a problem - I got used to the stop-and-start of it, and it changed how I wrote.
As Dylan Hicks observed, “In the era of word processing, the ideal of multiple drafts, once so important to the literary writer’s amour propre, has for many of us become something of an abstraction … for the most part, writing on a word processor is a constant braid of composition, revision, and erasure.” The Freewrite is a way to address that for those who wish to.
It’s not the only way, of course. One of my authors drafts in longhand, because that was his way of dealing with the same issue. My handwriting is shit, so this is my way.
All I need is a clicky keyboard, and a slab of wood to set her on
One of my very favorite quotes of all time is:
Yearly reminder: unless you’re over 60, you weren’t promised flying cars.
You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia.
Here you go.
But even the most dystopic of cyberpunk came up with a computer that actively fights you if you try to use it as a computer instead of TV 2.0 which, let’s face it, is what they all desperately want.
The digital divide is, I wager, wider. Damn near everyone has a computer nowadays, but it’s as far from general purpose as can be made, and programming is reserved for people whose job it is to know. To use a computer without knowing how to code is to not really use it at all.
I must say that Boing Boing is the only site where I don’t immediately regret reading the comment section. Discourse with minimal shiftiness towards other folks.
Thanks everyone.
Also, I think the keyboard is worth the whole endeavor, as annoying as the lack of editing tools might seem/be.
Wow. That quote is as brutal as it is accurate; and twice as cold.
I used a pen and a pad of paper instead of a Freewrite. I have written on the order of 35,000 words since July.
It was a kind of experiment at first; I’m kind of buried lately and I thought this would be a good way to spend a half hour or an hour a day writing with minimal distractions. I’ve found I’ve been able to get 2-3 handwritten pages on most days at roughly 250 words a page.
The big downside is obviously editing. At some point I’ll have to retype everything, which I’m not looking forward to. At the same time, my first drafts are awful, and most of the time I use the first draft as a guide for the next draft. (Which will be in Scrivener.)
Yes, there is a laptop within reach. Yes, I should be writing at this very moment. But I will also get my two pages done.
I’m wary of “you are using it wrong”, but isn’t the point of distraction free writing that you write? Even fixing typos isn’t writing, it’s editing. And fixing typos would be the editor’s, lector’s and typesetter’s jobs. Granted, they’ve been rolled into one role in many places and sometime the author has to fulfill these roles, but even then: It’s a different stage and a different job.
If you don’t play NetHack, that is.
Or Perl. -
Wow, elitist much? Not everyone has the skillset required to program. Not everyone has the time, money, or inclination to learn to program. In fact, for well over 90% of the population, asking them to learn to program is like asking them to learn to fly by flapping their arms. But if they don’t, well, then you regard them with contempt because they are just using their computers as mere TVs.
Computers are one of the most world changing inventions of the 20th century. They have transformed the lives of those who have access to them in countless ways large and small, some good, some ill, most mixed. They are transforming society itself so that it rapidly becoming impossible to live without having access to one.
And that is true regardless of whether or not those people have ever learned to program, and regardless of whether or not the computers in question are general purpose machines or locked down phone-like appliances.
Kindly reign in your nerd privledge and your elitist arrogance.
The thing I have learned from a lifetime of writing and reading about writers and reading writers talk about their writing:
Every single writer is different. Every. single. writer.
For some writers, the writing process is indeed split between drafting and revising, and the ease of “up arrow/change text” in a word processor is a hinderance and distraction to them. For others, drafting and revising are braded together inextricably, and they feel crippled when using a writing tool that hinders them from making changes as they go along.
And It’s not a typewriter/digital divide — if you look at essays by writers discussing their processes from before PCs came along, some writers produced clean first drafts with very little in the way of corrections (Isaac Asimov), while others had tons of crossouts and restarts that were made on the typewriter, not later in a separate revising stage (Douglas Adams). The same applies to manuscripts going back to the era before typewriters. Sometimes the edits are clearly made later with a different ink/quill, and sometimes they were made with the same ink and quill as the draft itself.
The current brouhahah over “distraction free” writing tools and the marketing of things like the freewrite obscures this fact by conflating the distraction of the internet and its power of procrastination, the distraction of notifications and dopamine delivery devices like facebook, and the distraction of that oh so tempting up arrow button on the keyboard.
Some writers attracted to these “distraction free” tools are seeking help in dealing with ther dopamine addiction. Some are seeking help in dealing with their procrastination tendencies. And some are seeking a writing tool without an easy up arrow.
It might be a good idea to know what kind of distractions you are fleeing from before spending time or money acquiring a “distraction free” writing tool. And knowing a writer’s needs would be good before prescribing solutions to them. Sadly @jlw seems to have not properly diagnosed his needs before purchasing his Freewrite.
Nethack is at it’s best on a VT100
Granted, I should have allowed for that. However, I stand by my main point: This is a device that’s intended for getting text out of the head and onto a medium and leave all the other stuff for later. That’s abundantly clear due to the obvious limitation of the editing capabilities. As such, it is not a bad tool, i.e. a tool that simply cannot function, like a hammer made of sugar, but the wrong tool for a job, like trying to losen screws with a hammer.
My hands hurt already.
