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Wednesday, July 8, 2015

An update in case I don't get anything else posted

It is hot beyond reason.  The desert creatures I know say that the humidity doesn't help either.  Yesterday I spent much of the day incapacitated by hot, hot, fucking HOT!

I might have been sick too, it's hard to tell if you feel like you're going to throw up because you're otherwise sick, or just because your innards are melting.

The whole "thinking with the brain thing" thing didn't get done.

I have likewise been distracted by randomness.  The idea of stripping language to bare grammar is still a thing I look at and think about.

There are various approaches to this and generally they're top down or bottom up on the field of words, but since the point is that words don't exist in isolation there's also the possibility of an approach that's perpendicular to those two because it starts with grammar.

The trouble is, abstract grammarians are strange creatures that don't do things the way that I intuitively think the ought to be done.

As one example English sentences tend to be of the form "Subject Verb Thingy" why "Thingy"?  Because grammarians can't agree on what it is.  It's the thing that completes the sentence.  Could we call it the "Complement"?  Nope.  That's taken.

"Thingy" is one of the arguments of the Verb which may or may not be called the Predicate.

The chief competing grammatical paradigms are:
-- "Subject Predicate" where the subject is the subject (at least that makes sense) and the predicate is everything else.
-- "Predicate Arguments" Where the Predicate corresponds to "Verb" and Arguments correspond to "Subject" and "Thingy"

So, anyway, grammar is not how I want it to be, so to do a grammar first approach I have to make up my own version of grammar theory even though mostly what I'm doing is recategorizing things and innovating nothing.

It sort of leads to taking:
Call me Ishmael.  Some years ago —never mind how long precisely— having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
And seeing that, grammar wise, it could have been
Think her smart.  Five days hence —always know when exactly— wanting one and all things outside the universe, or knowledge galore to keep her in grace, she'll decide she may learn abnormally quickly and practice such monumental things as thy God.
Because, you know, grammar.

And that's distracting.

Also, I donated to a kickstarter to make a video game a while back and the beta version, which all donating people have access to, came out today.  (So far I've died to exhaustion, dehydration, being mauled by a wolf, and drowning.  I am clearly great at video games.)  So, that exists.

And writing "I am clearly great at video games" has reminded me of Tange and her recurring "We are Excellent [noun]s" line.  Which of course led to bunches of distraction.

All of which is leading to me not getting any actual progress on posts done.

Money is in the same state as before: massive debt means long term bad, but not immediately catastrophic.

Haven't had a chance to check out if the new part will fix the washing machine.  If it doesn't the problem is either the motor or the electronics.  Both of those things are not within my fixing ability.  Thus if the replacement part doesn't work, that's scary.

Additionally the weekend is probably going to be largely away from keyboard time.

So, I'm here.  I'm overly warm, I'm alive.

If there's a lack of posts, I'm sorry about that.  (I'm already sorry about the lack of posts these past few days and how light on posts things have been before that.)

3 comments:

  1. It's been ridiculously hot throughout the northern hemisphere, from what I've heard. Stay safe, drink water, and replace electrolytes - we'll be here.

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  2. I'm glad you're alive.

    Sorry for the heat.

    ---Redcrow

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  3. Packbat: It's been ridiculously hot throughout the northern hemisphere, from what I've heard.

    Nah, not the whole hemisphere. Kitchener/Waterloo has been doing just fine, cooler than usual even, holding roughly steady at 20C +- 5. *knocks on wood*

    (Possibly other places are taking our heat for their own? ...I didn't mean that seriously, but it almost sounds plausible in an oversimplified way.)

    ---

    Good luck. What Packbat said regarding water and salt.

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