Writer, the Internet Typewriter

Welcome to Writer, The Internet Typewriter. You just open it up, press F11 for a full screen, and start typing. It sounds pretty simple, and it is, but you'll be amazed at how it frees you up from screwing around with font sizes and colors and all of the other nonsense that you usually busy yourself with instead of actually writing. You could just press F11 again to go back out to screw around on the internet - but you just don't because it's not right in your face all the time. It's all psychological.

You can choose from manual or electric typewriter sound effects for a very satisfying click-ity clack clack! It makes you feel like a real old-timey newspaper man! Getting the scoop!

 The display is customization, but I'm a fan of the old green-on-black Consola. If you have an old mainframe, green-screen system at your job, the screen gives the illusion that you're busily punching away at some old database. That's not something I would take advantage of, but I do like how it reminds of the Word Processor* that we had when I was a little kid. I used it to make alphabetized lists of all my comic books and albums, then comb through the data to analyze the state of my collection - I was kind of a weird kid. Probably the kind that grows up to write a blog.

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* Without Writer, I would have been distracted at this point by a Google search of old Word Processors, trying to identify the exact model that we had in the house. I'm not sure how much time that diversion would have cost me, but it's safe to say that it wouldn't have been time well spent

Below The Boat Charts

I don’t understand why so many men outright refuse to participate in the design of their own space. As a result of their own negligence, they are overrun and their homes bear no visible evidence that it is occupied by a human male.

 I have never been a fan of the “man cave” concept; that men’s things are so obviously tasteless and stupid that they ought to be relegated to a garage or basement where no other member of the family or guest need be subjected to their vulgarity. A very cool home is usually the product of more than one mind. A house that is completely overrun with floral, pastel, and leopard is every bit as ugly as the “man-cave” anyway. It is possible to incorporate some things that you like into the broader aesthetic of your home without turning it into “his and hers” spaces. You live here too, stupid. Compromise, you don’t have to cover the wall in posters of chicks on hot-rods, but certainly there is somewhere that the Todd McFarlane print or hand-stitched leather football can be displayed. 

How about a three-dimensional, bathymetric chart laser-cut into Baltic birch wood from Below The Boat? Yeah, how about that.

Dublin Club Chair

I’m not saying you should spend $1,200 on a chair.  I am saying that if you are going to spend $1,200 on a chair, that it should definitely be this chair.  This is the dopest god-damned chair I have ever seen in my life.  I’d pay a few bucks just to sit in it. 

Here's To My Health

It’s hard to find a reason not to admire Richard Branson.  He made his billions in record stores and airplanes, then used those billions to build himself a spaceship.  He reminds me of a playboy billionaire alter-ego of the wise-cracking comic book hero.  His blog is definitely something I recommend and for the past few days, I've been mulling over a recent post found there, “Blogging: Good For Your Health?”

“[Blogging] keeps the mind engaged and is an outlet for creativity, as well as encouraging communication.“

I think Branson’s assessment is spot-on.  I began writing my blog, The Augmentee in preparation for a 2008 deployment to Iraq as a sort of therapy; it was a fun way to deal with all the stressful unknowns presented by that unique solo deployment.  Once the blog gained a little traction among my friends and the small community of Navy Individual Augmentees, I admit I became a little addicted to the attention.  I still had fun writing it, but I had an equal amount of fun reviewing all the reader comments, obsessively watching the site’s hit counter climb, and admiring it's standing in the top-5 Google results for “individual augmentee*”

I've made several attempts to get a blog going since but they all fell miserably flat, bruising my fragile ego and failing to gain any audience.  I wasn't having any fun at all.  So this time, I’m just writing.  I still (desperately) hope people read and interact with it, but I’m not going to get all spun up about it.  Let’s see how it goes.

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* It helped that “augmentee” is a made-up, Navy word that doesn’t produce an unwieldy number of search results.