Hmm, is this new with the iOS 11 beta? Apple have added Dropbox-like collaboration for non-iWork arbitrary files stored in iCloud Drive?
The single most terrifying thing I can recall from my childhood: The Owl Service.
Lovely day for a walk (for at least 45 minutes, suggests @darkskyapp).
The new .textpack support in @toketaware’s iThoughts imports well into @ulyssesapp.
Not everyone makes use of the existing ‘Lion-style’ full-screen mode in os x—if you have a particularly large monitor, or just prefer having multiple overlapping windows visible at the same time, then you may see it as a waste of screen real estate—yet the tech world has seen a real growth over the last few years in applications and tools which are built with the goal of reducing distraction and increasing focus …
One of the main reasons to use [Markdown][#markdown] is to avoid any issues of layout, visual composition or rendering until after the actual content has been written. Unfortunately, when publishing something for the web, issues such as how content will display on different categories of devices do eventually need to be thought about. Image syntax in particular can be cumbersome in Markdown if you need to do something more complex than just specifying a single image and alt text …
This is a static website—the content you’re reading now is generated once, for all visitors, then presented in the same way each time for each browser request. That’s slightly different from the (current) internet norm of generating content as it’s requested, possibly on a targeted per-user basis, and probably using a database or some server-side business logic. Think of Wordpress and its plugins as examples of the latter, while Pelican, Jekyll, and Octopress would be examples of the former …
You rouse yourself. You limber up, as best you are able, bouncing and jiggling yourself in place, still supine, still sore. You walk yourself using shoulders and back so that you move in a little pinwheel, reorienting yourself within the nook. It is tiring and hideous but not unmanageable. You wheel yourself to your left, to your right then back again, as fast as you can manage, enjoying the sense of motion …
You wonder what you might become yourself given sufficient time, enboxed here upon your back, in darkness except for a crack—still visible—at the other short-end of the room. Some floor-oriented shape; some human matting. Perhaps, bamboolike, you will find yourself slowly shooting towards it; your legs extending outwards with rhubarb-forcing cracks, or with new shoots forming, budding out of the heel and soles of your husk …
You can recall only two members of that dialogue, bulb-lit or otherwise. It was the only one you had with that group of people, you are sure of it—some of these sureties are intuitions as much as memory—as though you are sometimes able to see a counter or tag associated with a given event in your internal catalogue which shows at a glance its number or relevance, regardless of the content recalled. Memory metadata. It is not an outcome of repetition; this was a single occurrence more clearly intuited than those with many. The thin lady and the one with a hat: the combination of impressions associated with them are significant enough to unconsciously mesh with your own sawtoothed internals …
Accidentally or otherwise, your memories are primarily nonsense. Nonsense or embarrassments or otherwise essentially degrading. Perhaps you have spent so much time in worthless activity that these are the only things to have seeped through, your memory rendered ineffectual through sheer saturation of moments you would not wish ever to recall, now so fundamental to general information storage or the fitting together of detail with detail that without them you would have no past at all …
The only memories you are able to invoke—which are invoked regardless of your intent—are broad and flat and saggy. Your behaviour and your circumstances are recalled, but never the mood. Detached from any actual experience of the time, they are at most re-imagined with the temperament that you bring to them now …
Over all else, the inundation continues; the layering of noise is as though you are in a much larger room with a hundred loud conversations taking place simultaneously and you have lost the facility to selectively bring into focus just that which is directed toward you. Some long-instilled behaviour insists that you attempt to decode it, you can feel the associated mental weariness spinning up, but you stop yourself from nodding or shaking your head in faux comprehension …
You need to shift your weight, it is too painful to continue to lie on those parts of yourself that you have so abused to get here. You attempt a roll: your shoulders and the muscles of your upper back are fatigued, so instead you slide your elbow, your right-hand elbow—perhaps you are right-handed?—upwards a little, in the direction of your head, until your head and torso begin naturally to tilt to the left. The pain is significantly greater in this interim position; your upper arm trembles with spasms that appear to require no deliberate effort on your part. You bear the pain and increase the angle and stress untill the tremor becomes a shimmy, the shimmy a full palsy. You pull leftwards with your head, fail and rock back. You pull leftwards with your head, fail and rock back. You pull leftwards with your head until your upper torso twists enough, your arms splayed, to bring your forehead into contact with the wood of the floor, fighting the pounding blood of the onset of unconsciousness and keeping yourself awake …
Whatever those dolls may be, however discovered and wherever encountered, you think of them as game pieces. You are as certain of this as of any fact relating to them, a pointless certainty, one of your own instincts rather than of any properties of the dolls themselves …
That day is a clutter, long in the recollection, with a twisting in its growth over time. You could not possibly have lived it for as long as you recall, could not have taken so many and so contrary a set of actions …
In the light: cloudsign. A feel of increasing lateness that may be just a camouflage of the weather. You can still feel the start of what will eventually be a full headache, the tiny but constant weight of the light resting on the front of your brain, straining the optic nerve, pulling your eyeball tight against the skull. Having to process day and night in alternation is surprisingly tiring …
In the darkness: box edges merge with box edges, merge with empty space. You roll your head and eye, memorising the impression of shape and volume, the fading lines of contrast against the increasing flat noise. Your pocket of visibility beyond the curtain is shrinking now, not obviously so, but you feel the decrease in granularity. The rain is noticeably loud, bleeding into and over the scraping of wood, sound and vision becoming a single lulling white-noise …
It is dark, but not pitch, with no shadow of movement from the curtain-bottom. Since the imagined window gutter is low and near, any interuptions in its illumination will be visible only when something is close-pressed against you. Your body beyond the curtain tingles with exposure, but your head is safe. You wink to your still dark-attuning eye, keeping your head tilted woundwards and away from the line of light. The dark slowly turns gritty, the grain of old film stock. You wink back and check for shadows in the light. None …
The skin of your shoulders is a continuous burn down through your muscle to your bones, which feel small and fragile and popped. The rear of your head is wet underneath your sweating: the sticky and underhair wet of blood or some small wound. You cannot move your fingers. The palms of your hands are cramping. Your lower back and abdomen are a single hard girdle, all the small pieces of yourself through which you have force-marched this distance are fused and immobile. You will not be moving again in the same manner, not for some time at least, but you still have the majority of your ankle and toe and foot strength as a reserve …