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from the they-never-make-them-like-they-used-to dept.
Ryan Reed reports that when most Game of Thrones fans imagine George R.R. Martin writing his epic fantasy novels, they probably picture the author working on a futuristic desktop (or possibly carving his words onto massive stones like the Ten Commandments). But the truth is that Martin works on an outdated DOS machine using '80s word processor WordStar 4.0, as he revealed during an interview on Conan. 'I actually like it,' says Martin. 'It does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key.' 'I actually have two computers,' Martin continued. 'I have a computer I browse the Internet with and I get my email on, and I do my taxes on. And then I have my writing computer, which is a DOS machine, not connected to the Internet.'
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Thursday May 15 2014, @02:49PM
Agreed. It is trivial to turn off the automatic correction on a modern word professor, so the whole rant about knowing how to use the shift key is garbage. This sounds more like "OOooh, look at me, I'm so avant garde I use a DOS machine to type my books..."
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shadowknot on Thursday May 15 2014, @03:16PM
You could be right but it could also be a matter of comfort. There is a good number of developers where I work who, despite having modern PC's with a paid-for IDE installed still prefer to use, and get good work done with, XEDIT on CMS through a TN3270 emulator. It's what they know and how they feel comfortable working. I think a reasonable analogy is that of artists. There are many modern ways of producing beautiful images using technology but artists still choose to work in water colors, oil paint, charcoal and other types of media that have been around for centuries.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday May 15 2014, @04:08PM
My dad, a now-retired high school History and Government teacher, used typewriters for making tests and writing his novel all the way up to 2005, when he caved and finally bought a laptop. He had painstakingly re-typed hundreds of pages of typewritten manuscript into the MS Works pre-installed on his laptop while there were much faster and better options available.
Of course, he didn't tell me all this until it was too late to save him the time and effort, and one of my first tasks for helping him out was to help convert all his .rtf files to .doc files using OpenOffice. He still uses OpenOffice, by the way.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Thursday May 15 2014, @04:30PM
.doc? That poor bastard. Why not something at least specifically open, like .odf? Unless there's absolutely no special formatting whatsoever, in which case, what's the point of converting?
Personally, I've been writing my book in .rtf because it's simple and I know all my alpha readers can open it with no drama. I discovered the importance of not assuming everybody has Winrar, too.
I've been toying with the idea of switching to TeX, but I'm not yet familiar with it enough to feel productive, and first priority has to be productivity. But then, I have funny ideas about advanced e-book formats, integrated audiobook versions, and indexed footnotes/wiki-style references, too.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday May 16 2014, @01:08AM
In case you're curious, he wanted to be able to use them with all of Word's fancy features he heard about from other teachers, he had Word installed on his work computer, and I wasn't about to give him my righteous .odf schpiel* because that would have led to a million other questions I didn't feel like answering.
That sounds like kind of a dick move, but you all know the weary feeling when you're removing malware or pressing the router reset button for the millionth time because dad or grandma won't put in the minimal effort to learn how to "fix their internet" themselves.
* Which also makes sense to me because the only reasons I write formal documents is because they are resumes and class assignments which must be in .doc or .docx format. I compose my trolls and other personal musings in plaintext with Gedit or Notepad++
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 15 2014, @03:35PM
Sorry but what a stupid thing to say, like "all people are fat" or "all cars are red". Certainly some are but I promise you some aren't. And there's a million word processors out there and most of them have a large number of really stupid and unhelpful help functions...
(Score: 2) by Rune of Doom on Thursday May 15 2014, @04:28PM
It's trivial if you're an experienced power user. If you're not, it can easily turn into an experience with a frustration level on par with using Windows 8 for the first time.
(Score: 1) by Oligonicella on Thursday May 15 2014, @07:19PM
Exactly. I write. Novels and fables mostly. I attended a writing group for a bit while in FL. Only a bit. I literally heard "I like to use a fountain pen so I can feel the words flow as I write." Same with him. He's just archaic.