Recent content on I've been left unattended - Tyler's blog
No one answered the door when I knocked, so I knocked again. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, then I shifted from toe to toe, then I sat down on the Dark Hickory high-performance porch decking. While sitting down, I knocked again. I got up and lounged in the rattan hanging chair, watching carpenter bees in the sky, a couple of thin wasps on the aged railing made of some unknown wood species,…
Might as well write something here this year! These are personal lists, and may contain any of the following: Things that came out in 2025 Things that I first experienced in 2025 Things that were general recurring favorites in 2025 Games I tried Outer Wilds this year, and never felt hooked, but still want to finish it. UFO 50 Hades Moonlighter Resident Evil Remaster Mini Metro Honorable mention:…
The square bracket is an unflappable being in the world of punctuation. Let’s do some real talk here for a sec. Drop the fiction. Square brackets are my favorite. Firstly – come on, nesting within parentheses (here’s an example [but you probably knew this already (sorry)])? Two of my favorite things, when combined, producing a third? Yes PLEASE let’s do it like that. Secondly,…
Parentheses are mercurial beings in the world of punctuation. See one parenthesis, and you’ve seen ‘em all? Hardly. (This is because you have to see at least one more.) How did they start, you find yourself asking. The same way anything starts, you find yourself answering: with a grand chorus of strings and a harmony of deep breaths (plus a wave of tiny click-clacks echoing from…
The pilcrow is a stylin' being in the world of punctuation.¶ The pilcrow goes to herring parties. The pilcrow orders Campari at bars and slicks its hair back with the finest water-based pomade. Like that tornado you used to doodle, the one with the wrinkly eyes, daring nose, and slicked-back hair. Your tornado doesn’t order Campari at bars, though. Ol' Tornie the Tornado hasn’t even…
What are You Doing While most of us use some sort of computer every day, you may be too busy tuning your Solaris box (olwm 4 lyfe) to have tried out some of the newer operating systems, like Windows and Linux. Below are some of my findings and recommendations. They are based on years of experience and should educate you perfectly. Acquisition Windows To get Windows, go to a computer store and buy…
The Basics My name’s Tyler! Thanks for visiting. Personal I currently live in Cincinnati, where small lizards rule with tiny iron fists. I love a good breakfast/crossword combo. Reading: The Control of Nature Listening: Ghost Train Orchestra Watching: More Lynch stuff when I get time Playing: Outer Wilds And here’s a random Wikipedia page. Professional I work for DoiT as a Senior Cloud…
Something’s different. You’ve turned into a piece of cheese. Maybe two pieces, actually, or maybe more. You can’t really tell (cheese can’t count). Let’s not pay too much attention to The Why of this event; doing so would lead us down a trail of rennet, Streptococci, and Gewürztraminer. Instead, let’s focus on The What. THE WHY Pretty sure I said let’s not…
I want someone to listen to our conversation. Who hasn’t thought this? Say you find yourself in a situation—maybe at a restaurant, one of those shiny-shoes ones—where you’re just aching to be an eavesdroppee, but no one at the tables around you seems interested in your conversation about Sorry! strategies. What do you do? You might be tempted to force the issue. Escalate. Maybe you…
The comma is a ravenous mostly-deep-sea-but-sometimes-shallow-sea being in the world of punctuation. Born in the late 1030s, the comma lived most of its early life under King Edward the Confessor. At that time, it was simply a line, or a mark. Sometimes people even called it Mark (never Marky, though). When things in the House of Wessex got, well, just too crazy, the comma (Mark) got fed up, and a…
The slash is a comfortable being in the world of punctuation. It may not be obvious from the multitude of alternative names it possesses (“separatrix” suggests panther-grade malice, I tell you), but the slash/stroke/virgula suspensiva (actually that one might just be a species of panther) has a history rooted in equanimity, good cheer, and sweaters. In the early (though some sources…
The apostrophe is a high-flying being in the world of punctuation. If the period is a snail, the apostrophe is a jet plane, and not something like those ridiculous Super Guppies, no, of course not, it’d probably be one of those private jets you would book based on how much you liked the shape of the windows, then as you watched the world underneath you’d wonder how you’d gotten…
The period is a roguish being in the world of punctuation. It lived with pirates! Oh my goodness. The period has strutted all around ship decks, sail compartments, and flag rooms - not that it only strutted. It’s seen ferocious battles against Redcoats, Bearded Redcoats, Antipirates, and other totally fearsome crews. Buccaneering? Check. Swashbuckling? Double Check. Multi-Cutlassing?…
The caret is a practically nonexistent being in the world of punctuation. The caret is a long-stale relic of the circumflex, the mildly useful overstrike from a time lost. Who needs such a bendy thing these days? The caret has been ritually driven out by more practical alternatives. The youth of this world don’t even know what a caret is. It’s been covered up by its own uselessness to…
The semicolon is a haunting being in the world of punctuation. Stuck between structural syntaxes from the start, the semicolon rides the no-man’s-land between sincere appreciation, filppant exploitation, and indifference. It’s less like a no-man’s land and more like the center of a Venn diagram, really. You walk into its study and there isn’t a cloak in sight. It hates…
The question mark is a highly regarded being in the world of punctuation. Its curly-but-not-too-curly-and-also-there-is-a-dot-there nature gives it that aura of superior breeding that ampersands can only wish for. Of course, things weren’t always so easy for the question mark. It made its first appearance in the Shetland Isles, where it was created and raised to pull carts and plow farmland. It…
The exclamation mark? I…whatever. It’s probably some kind of specter in the world of punctuation? Something mysterious. Not that it makes a difference. Well, it’s silly. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. What in the world is it for? Nothing. The world is written in questions (isn’t it?), not shrieks and battle cries. The exclamation mark is a renegade,…
The hyphen is serious business in the world of punctuation. It doesn’t even…you don’t even know. The hyphen is one of the earliest forms of punctuation, due to the fact that it is half of an equals sign, which is also one of the earliest forms of punctuation, due to the fact that assignment operators weren’t going to just create themselves. Hyphens were officially…
The ampersand is a pretty crazy looking little guy. It is used to join all kinds of words and numbers and even just plain old letters together. Where would the letters M, B, R, or even D be without the ampersand? In a much better place, that’s where. I’m here to tell you about the dangers of the ampersand. Born to a family of bloodthirsty (and almost impossibly agile) panthers, the…
The asterisk is an elusive being in the world of punctuation. It is most often used in texts such as books, articles, and Web Logs (commonly shortened to “blogs”) to distract you from the issue at hand* and give you something to look forward to; if one shows up, there’s a good chance that there may be more lying in wait. Like vicious panthers. Panthers of distraction. The…