Well, that was strange
I tell you what: writing this little biography has been plenty weird. I've never been the type to keep a journal or anything like that, so trying to sit down and write about myself (not an especially interesting topic) was. . .strange.
It was, however, the first thing I've written in DarkRoom. I'd highly recommend it if you have a short attention span (which I do); I think there's a superior Mac-only program for those of you who go for that sort of thing, but I really enjoyed the DarkRoom experience.
Comments
Cool, I'm totally intrigued by these kinds of programs for composing, editing, and collaborating with writing, since writing is (and arguably always has been) a technologically-mediated activity. Have you taken Michael Hancher's class?
Posted by: Kirsten | September 13, 2007 3:49 PM
I'm the complete opposite of tech-savy. Can you elaborate on this DarkRoom?
Posted by: Emily Lind | September 13, 2007 3:53 PM
Kirsten: I haven't taken that class. What's it about?
Emily: DarkRoom is a super-bare-bones word processor. (I don't even think it can print.) It takes over your entire screen: all black (or green, or blue, or whatever color to which you want to set it), and then you just. . .type. Sort of like on those old-skool Apples that we all played around with in 3rd grade, where the only thing on the screen was the blinking cursor.
Like I said, it really can't do much aside from the writing itself, and saving as a basic .txt file. I copy and paste stuff over into Word now to format it (pages, line spacing, font; that kind of thing), but I'm kind of enjoying the whole "immersed in nothing but the words" thing.
It does make it a bit tougher to jump around through the iTunes library, though. . . .
Posted by: John Sharkey | September 14, 2007 9:07 AM
Hancher's course isn't offered this fall, according to OneStop, but maybe in the spring? It's essentially a history of the technologies of writing (clay tablets to the web), which is in itself cool, but especially so because Michael so clearly loves teaching it and experimenting w/ technology with the students. Former consultants have raved about the course, and I probably have a syllabus in my files somewhere. I'll look.
Posted by: Kirsten | September 18, 2007 3:12 PM
I started to do NaNoWriMo a few years ago and used Pico in my Unix shell. I used it because it is a simple text editor on a system that I could log into from anywhere in the world and read-write protect.
Posted by: Kati | September 20, 2007 10:24 AM