Quasi-Surprise Week

Well, this week is… not going the way I thought it would. First there was Quasi-Surprise Jury Duty (not a surprise, but I’d forgotten about it entirely until my phone reminded me, which happens for Certain Things I Don’t Like Thinking About) and then I slept for twelve hours and woke up with body aches, a full nose, and a mild fever.

The cold I’ve been fighting off knows that yesterday was high-stress, and it has chosen to put up its banners and ride to war.

So it’s going to be that kind of week. Of course.

Edits for the second book of the epic fantasy trilogy are underway. Today is for setting up the workspace and cleaning, as well as getting myself back into that headspace. If my language acquires a certain formality, we all know what to blame now.

Of course, I am often a formal creature, when I don’t know someone well. Those manners are built to keep everyone in the room on an equal footing and make sure I don’t overstep; they are a comforting way for me to show respect and be careful of other people. I know manners can be deployed as weapons when punching up, and I like doing that, but I also like using them just as a matter of course.

Anyway. I had plenty of things planned for today, including writing some thoughts about Bede (oh, my GOD, but Christianity is a TRIP) but that’s just… not gonna happen. I’m knocked off-center and hideously out of breath.

I will say, however, that I’m looking at moving away from Twitter. Not entirely, but there was a conversation this morning about deleting tweets past a certain age, and it resonated with me. There were a few options I considered; one was Semipheremal, which needs some programming know-how to deploy, and the other, recommended by a couple fellow authors, was TweetDeleter.

I loved the idea of Twitter when it started, and I’ve made some relationships there I am loath to lose. But… honestly, it’s a hellscape, full of bad-faith actors and unregulated shittery. I’m pretty sure I’m going to set TweetDeleter to erase everything over a year old. Right now I have it set between one and a half to two years, just because I like to ease into things.

The major draw of Semipheremal is that you could choose certain parameters–a tweet with more than a hundred likes, frex–and keep those while deleting other old tweets. But then I started thinking… you know, if a post of mine gets over a hundred likes, it’s a sure bet that the asshats looking to troll, hijack, and harass aren’t far behind. Plus there will inevitably be accusations of “deleting to cover things up”, which are par for the course with Photoshop and screencaps running around nowadays.

And of course I’m only a semi-public person, not a government official whose words and boosts should be recorded for posterity and for the people the government is claiming to serve. So I’m feeling like it’s an ethical choice to use the service in the first place, and to set a time limit on how long those things stay active in the second.

So I’ll probably drop the time limit down to a year. Of course, I’ll keep stuff on my Mastodon, where most of my microblogging goes anyway.

In any case, I should get moving. Waking up full of snot and body aches was not quite optimal, and I’m going to be drinking ginger and lemon in hot water by the bucketful to try to get this crud washed out of my system. Some searing hot curry wouldn’t go amiss, either.

And with that sorted I can step back into a preindustrial society, take a look at the architecture of a book, and start trimming, tweaking, and expanding. thank the gods nobody’s going to be in the office until after New Year’s, that means I have a reasonable amount of time to get this beast into better shape. 150k now, 200k by the time I’m finished, I’m sure.

…even just typing that made me tired. Maybe I should schedule a nap, too.