Monthly Archives: December 2020

More thank-you gifts

Posted on December 6, 2020 | 1 comment

I’ve already mentioned that I’m going to send a copy of my photobook PAINT to everyone who’s sponsoring me on Patreon for $5 or more per month. Since I announced that, my number of Patreon sponsors has gone from 16 to 15.

Um.

So OK, I have lots of copies of my other books sitting around, already bought and paid for, and so I’m going to send a free copy of your choice of Songs of Love and Grammar, Confessions of a Word Lush, or 12 Gifts for Writers to everyone who is sponsoring me on Patreon for $2 or more per month (and yes, that means that the $5 or more people get PAINT plus one of those books). If you are sponsoring me for at least $2 a month as of January 1, 2021, you will just need to send me your address and tell me which book you want and I will mail it to you.

If you’re sponsoring me for at least $1 a month, I am extremely grateful, and you get a free PDF of PAINT and advance views of some blog posts, but I can’t quite afford to mail you a printed book for free… but I will send you one for the cost of postage if you want; just message me on Patreon.

Maybe next year I’ll have a book in the pipeline that you can buy in an actual physical bookstore… and maybe you’ll even be able to go shopping in one!

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mishaptics

Posted on December 4, 2020 | 1 comment

You probably know what haptics is: touch; the study of touch; interfaces that make use of touch, including those that stimulate and simulate touch – electronic devices that give feedback through vibrations, pressure, and such like. The word comes from Ancient Greek ἅπτω haptō ‘touch, grasp, fasten to’.

Well, as Adriana Cloud (@adicloud) pointed out today, haptics implies the existence of mishaptics.

Yes, yes, mishap is not actually related to haptic (it uses the same hap that shows up in happen), fine, blah blah blah. Play with us. There is plenty of use for mishaptics. If you have a video game controller that vibrates for feedback but goes out of control, that seems like mishaptics. If someone uses that vibrating controller for unapproved purposes and experiences difficulties as a result, that is also mishaptics. If a surgeon is using a haptic interface for remote or laparoscopic surgery and the feedback is incorrect, causing things to be cut that should not have been cut, that is most certainly mishaptics.

But it goes beyond that. Remember, haptics is touch and the study of touch, not just in electronic devices but in the wider world as well. It’s when you reach to shake hands with someone and miss. It’s when you try to hold someone’s hand in a dark theatre and stick your hand in their soft drink. It’s when you’re out on the deck in the dusk and you reach for your beer and grab a raccoon instead. And, I think, it’s every time you step barefoot on a piece of Lego.

But yeah, it’s definitely when unexpected electronic haptic interface things happen. Virtual reality losing its virtue. The field of teledildonics opens up mind-blowing possibilities.

So, uh… anyone got any particularly good mishaptic stories to share?

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nytel

Posted on December 3, 2020 | Leave a comment

You ever have one of those days where you spend all your time faffing about, trying different things with various degrees of disaster and disappointment, and at the end of the day you’ve accomplished jactiate? Just nothing real to show for it at all, and plus in addition as well too also you feel kind of bad and beaten?

Oh.

Well, aside from today, and yesterday, and… um, you ever have more than five days in a week like that?

Of course there’s a word for it. It’s not a German word, either, though it’s not really a modern English word. It was used back in the Middle English period, and the spelling hasn’t been updated since then because people haven’t been using it. So it’s in the Oxford English Dictionary as nytel. That looks like it should be said to rhyme with Keitel or, um, buy sell or something, but it’s safer to assume that it rhymes with little, and if it had been in regular use between now and then it would probably be spelled nittle or nittel.

Where does it come from? It’s not entirely certain, because the paper trail for its usage is, um, exiguous, and many hours of research would likely be so much nyteling (or nittling), but the best speculation is that it’s from nite- ‘not know’, which is from ne ‘not’ plus wit ‘know’ (as in unwitting), and then the -le suffix that indicates repeated action, as in crackle, sparkle, and so on. So just as sparkle means ‘spark a whole bunch over a period of time’, nytel thus means ‘be unwitting a whole bunch over a period of time’. In other words, ‘be clueless a lot for a while’. 

Which… sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it?

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