Latin and the Celts
I am insufficiently yet overly caffeinated, operating on little sleep, and smothered in stress. Latin, latin, latin. I greatly miss when I thought learning the declension tables was the hard part.
First declension I was like "oh, this is a lot."
Second declension I was like "what the fuck, neuters?"
Third declension, I was like "okay I think that's enough declensions for me."
I learned the fourth and fifth declensions after the relative pronoun and a bunch of types of ablatives, so I was like "this is such a nice break. Thank you for only giving me a declension this week instead of throwing me another relative pronoun."
Now I have to deal with all these ablatives, and also participles, which I just barely barely comprehend. Now I'm learning about the ablative absolute, the passive periphrastic, the dative of agent, and I'm just sitting here like... dude. I just got done with spring break, and I need another spring break just to soak this all in.
"Maxime defessus sum." ("I am extremely tired"). I should get that tattooed with how accurately it represents me, but I don't want to manifest mental exhaustion. I already have the four cardinal virtues, "wisdom, justice, temperance, fortitude", a tattoo that has grown stale for me because I don't know if I still even believe in such a thing as an "absolute truth" or "transcendent virtue". I want to get a little d20 tattooed to represent my trust in entropy, but I fear that will also grow stale with time.
After my second semester of Latin I'm going to plunge into Old Irish. Something about the Celts seems so appealing to me lately, which is partly why I've integrated them into my writing project. Ireland and Wales were the last holdouts of Celtic culture against the Romans, after they conquered Gaul and Brittania. So, logically, it's either Irish or Welsh, if I want to plunge into a Celtic language. According to an atlas on the Celts that I'm reading, Ireland is where Celtic culture really flourished and developed and matured the most. And there is a LOT less resources available on speaking Old/Middle Welsh than there are for Old Irish. So it's also a choice by merit of convenience of having a textbook.
Irish is a dying language, with only 71,900 people (4% of the Irish population) able to speak it. Welsh has a lot more speakers. But somehow Old Irish seems more suited to autodidact learning -- there are several Old Irish textbooks on Amazon, but not a single Old Welsh or Middle Welsh textbook that I can find.
My lust for obselete hardware and software
Dying dying dying to get my goddamn stupid DOS computer so I can run Wordstar 4.0 like my personal inspiration GRRM. He's written millions of words in Wordstar, he still uses it to this day. I had a stupid computer that looked PERFEECT, and it wouldn't work, and I don't have the goddamn money to get the computer, but boy oh boy, I would give anything. I need one with both a 3.5 and a 5.25 floppy drive, which is just such a goddamn headache.
I also want to complete the setup with an IBM Model M keyboard. The million-word-long fantasy epics will write themselves. I will become possessed by the machine, it will drain me of life until I become a wraith, like Ring Wraiths from Lord of the Rings.
"I have to say the best keyboard I ever owned was the IBM Model M keyboard." — wertperch, February 3rd, 2023
"You could use them as weapons." — wertperch, March 29, 2024
There's a company that builds Model M keyboards, replicated with their proprietary switches, and USB!! But, if I ever get this hypothetical machine, I will want the real-deal. I also do not want to buy it for the reason that I rage very hard when I play video games and I often smash my fist hard against my keyboard. Overwatch did this to me, and League of Legends is ten times worse.
If I had like a million dollars I could probably hire some people to design a product, a typewriter-laptop-hybrid that runs Wordstar 4.0 and supports USB sticks, and comes with software to convert from Wordstar format to docx. I have a perl script that I found in some obscure corner of the internet that does so, but it has hiccups -- I have to delete erroneous spaces and new lines. It would be the perfect product, but I don't have the impetus. Plus, who would even buy it?
Huge shoutout to locke baron for their DOS writeup, I deeply enjoyed reading about all the different DOS versions. My floppies are for MS-DOS 6.0. They're in a box somewhere in the room I'm writing this in.
I was able to get Wordstar up and running on my primary computer, but come on -- it only holds true power if it's authentic. Otherwise it's just another plebeian computer program, lost among a sea of word processors that run on Windows 11. Screw convenience, curse modernity. As my brother would say, "embrace the suck."
Writing more
I can't remember if I've written about it here, but I was approved for a Miraheze wiki, which I use for all the notes for my current writing project. It's a high-fantasy story of indeterminate length. I have spent dozens of hours writing article after article on the wiki, right now I'm sitting on 30 articles (not pages, articles. If you count pages the number is 79). Today I sat down to write another article, and I got caught up digging for the nominative masculine singular Old Gaelic inflections of "red" and "god" so a deity can have a name (Día Derg). That took like 30 minutes because I am inefficient, and by the time it was done the impetus to do some original writing had evaporated.
I just... I feel paralyzed every time I sit down to do actual writing on the story, because it's like... oh, I haven't written an article on any of these things that could very well be an element of the story once I do finish the wiki. Five member kingdoms of the territory of Áes Coím, or the three member kingdoms of Áes Báistighe, or of the three dead empires I've only wrote-up Ríge Gréine. I haven't even started on the page for the Báistighe-Samrad War, and I need to write about the people involved in the Inis Íarainn Labor Revolts, and it's just... my perfectionism is making me work on the wiki for hours and hours instead of actually writing the story. It'll probably be like 20 or 30 more hours before I get around to writing the story. The semester might be over by then, maybe I will have lost all my writing momentum.
I find that a glass of wine helps me write. I bought a massive bottle of White Zinfadel with the intent of it lasting me months, a brand I've never tried, but this brand tastes so much worse than the cheaper Dollar General wine. It tastes like bread, is the only way I can describe it. I'm not a wine expert, I just know what I like and I haven't really bothered branching out.
But Latin. It festers in the neglected corner of my mind, anxiety and urgency is seeping out of it and into my psyche that I feel like I am neglecting whenever I sit down to write. I do it anyway, but... ugh.
Hey, this daylog up to this point is 1/30th of a novel in length. Would you look at that.
Personal stuff
I wasn't sure if I wanted to make a separate header for this or just lump it into "writing more". I just... I feel like writing is my purpose in life, coming up with a draft, and everything else is secondary, but it just... life keeps me from dedicating myself fully to this. My life right now is the closest I'll ever be to the proverbial ivory tower, living off my parents' charity, struggling with only one class, the closest I'll ever be to a full-time writer, and even then I find myself losing momentum. I need like ten million dollars so I can buy a small house or some cabin, deeply in the middle of absolutely nowhere and live a life in quiet domestic seclusion, writing. Arizona, maybe, or some hilly forest 40 minutes from the Ozarks and 40 minutes from the nearest Walmart, just me and God and my writing. No wife, no kids, nothing. maybe a koi pond. I want it more than anything. It will never happen, not with how my life is right now.
I remember when I was 20, I made a vow to myself that if my life wasn't back on track by my 27th birthday I would join the 27 club. I'm getting close and it's a little depressing because I know I'm not strong enough to go through with it. I just feel so aimless right now, barely able to handle one class, not working, surviving off disability and my parents.
I find myself thinking a lot about my dead twin. I wonder if all my problems are some kind of dissonance with the entropy of the universe, if I was even supposed to exist in the first place, or if it's some divine accident. It's a quandry with no answer and no resolution, just a little feedback loop in my head. I wonder if s/he is watching me. I wonder if I disappoint my twin, if s/he finds me weak, passive, pathetic. I'm sure some Baptist would say that s/he's burning in hell, thank god I've evolved past traditional Christianity.
My father was trying to convince me to go to church with him. It's a little funny, because a year ago he would have told me he never ever wanted to go back to church. I view this as a regression on his part, and I told him that. I told him that I view church to be places people go to get brain-raped into believing superstitions because they can't think for themselves, and he told me that Satan himself was putting those ideas into my head. He's so nauseatingly Christian, deeply entrenched in the pathologies inherent to infallability and inerrency, and it makes him difficult to tolerate. I believe in the Christian God, I believe the Bible is probably mostly inspired, and that's really all we have in common ideologically.
Shakespeare
I added 600 words to my Macbeth writeup in a file on my pc, but I don't know if I want to add them to the writeup posted on e2, because I feel like posting it a second time would come across as self-important. Maybe if I write another 600 I will do so. I posted it to my website.
I've decided to get started on my Shakespeare books, the ones I bought back in December. I'm going to start with Emma Smith's This is Shakespeare, and then maybe Harold Bloom's much-hated Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human. There is also Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare, which is an obvious choice, but I'm reading it all out of order. Each chapter is dedicated to a different play, and it details the history and culture surrounding the play (who the audience was, what was happening historically at the time, the inspiration for the play, etc.)
I didn't get through Julius Caesar on the Ides of March. I am a disgrace, but it's fine because I got most of the way through it.
Shit. My mother said she would buy me a book, and I asked for a book on the history of the Celts. I should have requested a King Lear, or maybe an Othello. My Riverside Shakespeare is way too hefty to be lugged around in a backpack. I suppose it would be a good workout though.
Shakespeare's plays have a hypnotic quality to them. His mastery of English, the complexity of his characters. I adore him.
Miscellany
I have more to write but I am growing sleepy. It's 1:33 AM, which is early for me, so I guess I'll try to sleep and see what happens.