#RomanceReviews 4: I'm going with a palate cleanser of an actual #romance this time: Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert. I listened to the previous book in the series and it was sweet, hilarious, and British (they chose the narrator well).
I'm expecting this to be a straight, interracial romance with at least one neurodivergent character.
Re: not going down too fast: "And if you did it too quickly, you wound up with a woman who was more interested in what you could do with your tongue than your sudoku skills."
Alright, here is my #RomanceReviews roundup for Act Your Age, Eve Brown. Loved it.
As expected going in, it was sweet, hilarious, interracial and British. So British. The banter had me cackling repeatedly as I tried to do housekeeping. This was a little bit of an enemies-to-lovers plotline.
Both (straight) neurodivergents were really truly into each other. This was what I think of as a true romance, with deep emotional and sexual attraction.
Him: “Is it terrible that I’m going to fuck you on this desk?”
Also him: “He wanted inside her confetti-strewn head every chance he got. It was the only foreign country he could remember wanting to visit.”
*swoon
I love that Talia Hibbert writes neurodivergent people and fat people as genuinely desirable and competent.
Good consent, 5 stars, would totally fuck this guy.
Pointing out that @everylibrary has joined the fedi.
If you care about US public and school libraries -- if you want to see library censorship stop -- give 'em a follow, and some spare bucks if you have 'em.
I’ve maintained a branch of the old micro-emacs (not GNU emacs) for decades. And by “maintained” I really mean “mostly kept working”. It’s a scrappy little editor from the eighties(!) and the “s” in scrappy is silent.
The version I have grown accustomed to isn’t even the most recent version of microemacs, it’s a offshoot from uemacs 3.9 that was maintained by Petri Kutvonen at Helsinki University because it was portable and supported DOS, VAX/VMS and Unix.
Over the decades, I’ve “enhached” that thing to actually mostly understand UTF-8, and increased some internal limits, but it’s mostly the same thing that I used in the early nineties.
Anyway.
I don’t love the fact that it’s a very limited text editor. I’d like syntax highlighting etc. But my fingers are absolutely hardcoded to it, and I am not in the least interested in something that makes me switch away from those (much less start using a mouse to move around etc).
Which is just a very long way to say: “Does anybody know of some slightly more modern GUI editor that actually has good support for really changing keybindings”.
And I mean really configurable. As in “I can make ESC-J auto-justify text, and ESC-Z be ‘exit-and-save, and ^X^C will exit without saving”. Not some half-way state where “sure, you can make ^X exit, but no, you can’t make ^X or ESC act as Alt / Meta keys for other keys?
And yes, I know one answer is “teach your fingers new ways”. But my micro-emacs works just fine, and so it really isn’t worth it to me.
And please - don’t even bother replying with “Xyz is a great editor” unless you know and can show exactly how to rebind a key sequence like that ^X^C. I don’t use nearly all the uemacs keybindings, but I use an odd set of them.
I’d rather maintain just a keybinding file than a whole scrappy editor.
Edit: clearly I should have specified that I’m not interested in yet another “runs in a terminal” editor, or some even older editor (ie “real” emacs, or vim) that just has had more lipstick applied over the years.
Bump: Two GUI editors come to mind: Tea and Geany.
I think TEA is about as close to your wish as you are going to get. TEA will likely do 95% of your wishes except exit+save and ESC key in sequences. It is hackable and readable Qt/C++ so you can patch and push with ease.
"TEA is a C++, Qt(4,5,6) text editor with the hundreds of features for Linux, *BSD, Mac, Windows, OS/2 and Haiku."
TEA text editor has endless configuration options including all the key mappings that allows custom setting of everything in the KEYBOARD tab as shown in the screenshot. Please note that the quirky monspace font is not the default TEA setting but from my own custom QT settings. You can apply any font you wish to the interface.
If you want to modify hotkeys via source code you would use Qt::QAction in tea.cpp in the repo. I'm not a Qt/C++ programmer but the source syntax is obvious and I have hacked other Qt interfaces to my liking with no problems.
One rough edge I found is that if the application is already open, passing a file via command line will not open it. I could not find any other UX bugs in it.
There is also sublime text which allows configuring the keybindings in .json files It also allows ESC > command bindings. The user can put custom context and args in the binding actions.
I have had to fight for months to be able to survive from bad people and try to find a safe home, I have not had much luck, I have suffered a lot these last few weeks and I have not been able to eat or sleep well, please could someone help me get the funds to Can I spend Christmas safely?
Given all the Threads discussion there is one short thing I need to say.
The simplest tech-world thing I learned from the whole Meta in Myanmar project is that Meta is WAY more callous, deceptive, and incompetent with the life-or-death things that matter the most than even most of their critics understand.
This corporate callousness is a direct result of the debt-based monetary system of the entire world, and of the specially constructed debt hypothecation system in the USA. As the monetary systems have grown less diffuse and more centralized the callousness has increased.
For many centuries, the central tenet of fascism has been a mandatory tax on all property of the poor, and requirement to pay the tax in a monetary unit controlled by the rulers. Nobody actually owns their home. They rent it from the state and must pay the ad valorem and land tax, or be forcibly ejected. This tenet of tax fascism holds true in feudalism and market economies, and under socialism. If the monetary unit is not a currency, then the monetary unit is the productive labor of the serf. By taxing homestead real estate and employee wages, all serfs are forced to participate in the economic and tax structure by running an endless rat race to keep from having their homestead confiscated by the state. Abolition of the homestead real estate tax on any primary domicile up to 40-80 acres, depending on annual precipitation, and abolition of the income tax on EMPLOYEE wages (not officer or executive), would liberate hundreds of millions of souls from the rat race. If you don't work in the job and pay the taxes, the fascist courts take your home and render you homeless. This is a crime against humanity and nobody is speaking out against it.
This property tax and income tax system is the FOUNDATION of Western imperial fascism. All political movements will fail and will only increase the reach of fascism into every aspect of human life. As economies grow more centrally planned and monopolistic, the control over everyday activities grows increasingly centralized.
If you are not moving to abolish the tax on homesteads in your country, you are hacking at the branches of evil rather than at the root. A people secure in their property and homes and wages are a free people. A people insecure in these are slaves.
It is very simple. A tax and money system based upon debt or hypothecation of property to debt will always wax more and more fascist. This is the story of human history and everyone is ignoring it at their peril. Many people praise the idea of taxing their neighbors to pay for public schools, where their children will learn to be obedient serfs and work endlessly to pay their taxes.
Certain people leverage themselves into this system through corporations, and in order to prevent themselves from ever being the poor downtrodden, they run roughshod over all the poor downtrodden. They get addicted to the status, and envision themselves having a superior rationale due to their success. To keep themselves on top, they feel motivated to keep pushing everyone else down in a relentless struggle for mastery over the serfs in the poor and middle classes.
Laws and policies and "programs" can not, do not, never have, and never will end these problems of corporatocracy. Simply by abolishing the tax on homestead real estate, and abolishing the income tax on wages, the entire economy is forced to undergo a metamorphosis away from debt and rent seeking, to actual productivity. A people secure in their homes are not forced to work their fingers to the bone in an economic rat race. They have the time preference to make more beneficial decisions regarding work and career because they don't have the stress of homelessness or bankruptcy always looming on the horizon. Your rulers want this shadow cast on you and they have engineered the tax laws for this very purpose. Of course they give pretexts and justifications and subterfuges, but the end result was the real intention, as in the maxim, "Outward actions indicate inward intent."
No one wants to hear this. They are happy to tax their neighbors to death as long as they feel it serves their social agenda. We can signal about how bad the corporations are, or as a people we can admit how bad we are for enlisting the guns of government to rob our neighbors of their wages and homes under the unjust property and income tax schemes.
Corporations are the only entities that should pay income tax. No flesh and blood human being with the status of EMPLOYEE should be taxed on their wages for hire. The power to tax is the power to destroy, and much destruction it does. Countless Americans are dragged out of their homes by county sheriffs while their homes are repossessed or auctioned off for back taxes. This is the heart of ryot tenure, which is old-world fascism. This abomination does not belong in America. It really does not belong anywhere in the world. But the rulers and their dependents love to have it so.
That is well and good. It is easy to hate the big man. It is harder to love the little man. If we hate the fat cat while continuing to abuse the runt of the litter, are we any better than the fat cat? If we excoriate the rich while only giving lip service to the poor, wouldn't such hypocrisy make us Pharisees at heart?
I do agree on a host of limitations upon billionaire involvement in politics and bureaucracy, such as abolishing campaign contributions to lobby groups and PACs completely and requiring candidates to spend their own money for advertising, and placing caps on how much money TOTAL can be received by any candidate for office.
I also think people should keep their hands out of their poor neighbors' pockets by abolishing the income tax on employee wages and the property tax on primary dwellings.
Then the taxes can be excised from commerce between corporations, freight bills, imposts and duties. This would fundamentally alter both the economic and monetary system in favor of the have nots without a pile of even more abuse-prone laws and bureaucracy.
Corporations are creatures of the state and they should be taxed. All real estate held by all associations, corporations, and entities should also be taxed. This includes any non-domicile real estate held by religious corporations, churches, mosques, temples, etc. International and interstate non-profits should be abolished or taxed at a double or triple rate compared to those operating only within a domicile zone. Non-profit entities should be prohibited from operating outside the area of their domicile unless there is a compelling public interest approved by the legislature on a case-by-case basis. This would do away with many abusive tax shelter foundations and require the rich to put a big cut of that money to work in the economy instead of squandering it away in paper rents and interest-bearing schemes subsidized by the government through bank bailouts.