this was originally posted on cohost

chances are that if you’ve heard of stenography it’s in the context of it being a way to write things really fast. that’s fair — that is the primary purpose of it — but i wanted to talk about writing slowly

for perspective, professional stenographers need to hit 225 wpm to graduate. while working, they may need to be even faster to match the maximum speed that most people can understand audio — around 270 wpm. audiobooks are generally slower to account for the density of the text and for accessibility — around 150 wpm. a fast typist can type over 100 wpm. an average typist can type around 40 wpm.

let’s talk about going slower than that.

if you start learning stenography, you’ll be really slow. you will be slower than even a hunt and peck typist, because not only do you have to hunt for all of your letters, you have to coordinate your hands to press them all at the same time

this makes the word "hot"

if you were like me you will have tried the first lesson on typey type and...

i promised myself to limit the number of posts about the website. something something health of a platform inversely correlated with posts about said platform. part truth part superstition

but there were still a bunch of thoughts i wanted to get out of the way so uh here they are

dotted grid background

spent a while making the post background have a dotted square pattern like in the hobonichi techo. i’ve never even owned one of these notebooks, but i used this pattern as a background on my digital notebook and i’m a convert from dot grid now.

making the background was pretty fun, though it took me a while to figure out how to get the dasharray juuuuust right so that you get that beautiful cross at the corners of the squares

the hard part is making all the elements actually align to the grid. luckily, i found out that someone else had already done the hard work of figuring out how it worked when they made the monospace web a couple of months ago.

here’s some implementation details:

• CSS round came around in May 2024, and that allows me to control the width of the post so that none of the squares get cut off
  • unfortunately...

is that you can feel real bad for being no contact on a family member’s birthday, open up your journal, see the linked entry for last year, read up on that disaster that you’d totally forgotten about, and feel a bit of peace for missing out on that this year round

had a sudden burst of hyperfocus and made a mask cover even though i’m not great at sewing and didn’t know what i was doing. i traced the mask and winged it, and it shows because there’s various parts that weren’t quite the right shape and had to be adjusted once the mask wasn’t flat on my desk. turns out that thinking in 3D is kinda hard (but also kinda exciting)!! it’s held on by being tucked into the corners, which isn’t very secure. maybe one day i’ll learn how to attach a clip or an elastic band to it.

now that it’s done, though, i’m a bit worried about whether this is going to negatively affect mask effectiveness. there’s one post on reddit i found where someone tested a slight decrease in breathability and fit with a mask cover, but still passed a fit test on their face. not sure if that’s a direct comparison though, since i think they attached their fabric with glue?

at any rate, i’ll save these for lower risk situations and maybe try again with a much looser mesh-type fabric