The Wordsmith's Forge

The use of "because" is evolving.  This is cool.

I am not convinced that it is behaving as a different part of speech, though.  I perceive this more as a deletion effect, omitting the preposition previously used with it: "I'm late because of the internet" --> "I'm late because internet."  It doesn't work the other way, keeping the preposition: *"I'm late of the internet."  

Make everything okay.

Looks like good sympathetic magic to me.  Probably works better for technomages.

 This app is designed to help people read online without skipping or repeating lines, useful if you have dyslexia or certain other challenges.  It uses color changes to mark the end and beginning of lines; rather clever.

Robot Turtles is a board game for young children and one older player.  It introduces the basics of computer programming. Yes, really.  It requires no reading!  Only one person needs to read the rules.  It's fun, it's different from most kiddie games, and it teaches something useful.  This project is already funded and well into its stretch goals, but you can still support it for the perks, to get a cool game for your little one(s), or just for the sake of saying "MOAR PLZ!" 

Here's an amusing tidbit about moral attitudes regarding robot sex.

My view: Having sex with another sentient being is cheating, if you have accepted monogamous parameters in your relationship.  Having sex with an inanimate object is not cheating, because it is not a person.

What do you think?

Here's an interesting new business model from American Giant clothes.  

I like the idea of cutting out the middlemen, doing the work locally, and paying factory workers a decent wage.  I love the idea of designing clothes from an engineering perspective and making them to last.

Unfortunately the online-only model is a dealbreaker for me when it comes to clothes and most other products.  If they had a storefront, I could watch for one and try on the clothes.  But most things, I won't buy unless I can touch them, unless it's an exact duplicate of something I've already handled.  That's because few products meet even my minimum standards of performance ("Will it get the job done?  Is it non-hazardous?").  The only things somewhat less subject to that barrier are things I can test equally well online, such as text or images, which is why crowdfunding works well for me.

I'm concerned about the trend of commerce shifting to cyberspace, because for me, that usually puts things out of my range. I don't like the way society is becoming less participatory.  Take bookstores -- I've seen the industry go from a zillion small individual stores plus a few chains, to the era of chain stores and the marvelous megastores, to the fucking book desert we have now where the nearest bookstore is an hour away from me with a shitty little magazine section, almost no music, a shrinking collection of books, and a massive ereader booth right in front of the door.  To me this doesn't say "Come in and fall in love with some books!"  It says "Buy our gadget and go home and read ebooks."  Fuck it.  If I'm going to read on a screen, I'll support bite-sized crowdfunding.  If I'm going to pay for a paper book, I want to hold it in my hands first, and I'd like to have a nice place to browse the shelves.

Goal-Fish is a new site offering a customizable to-do list by shoaling_souls.  It has categories, such as chores and fun, with constraints (day/night, indoor/outdoor, current pain level, cost of supplies, etc.) for available tasks.  Once you ask it for a task, it presents a simple description, and you can open detailed instructions if you wish.  Learn more here.  

The site is optimized for people with assorted physical or mental limitations, so it has a high accessibility rating, but anyone can use it.  If you have trouble with choice-paralysis or time management, Goal-Fish looks like a more effective solution than some of the simple to-do prompters already extant.  So if you have friends with those kinds of challenges, pass the word.

This is a crowdfunded project.  Your donations keep the site going.  It's a distraction-free zone with no ads, so donations are the only income.  Anyone can use the site free, and access the generic features without an account.  Registering is free and lets you add some of your own categories and tasks.  Donations allow you to add even more categories and tasks.

If you're on Dandy, check out this app proposal.  It's meant as a time-saver.  You designate certain apps as distractions, and then it asks you a trivia question before letting you access them, so you have to think twice.

jewelfox tipped me to the search engine DuckDuckGo.  I am intrigued by its pyramid structure.  That is: it tends to put a definition and some likely hits at the top of the page, then other things underneath.  The visual interface is more legible than average too.

This 9-year-old girl's brothers told her she couldn't make a role-playing game.  She's proving them wrong.  And this is how we deal with boys telling girls they can't do technology.  Notice that the project is already several times over goal.  So there.