/lounge/ - sushi social

>>4739
I think it's bad writing, those metaphors are too varied and too overwrought to be very meaningful.

On one hand they're not instantly relatable, we never think "my hair feels like poison needles". On the other there's no theme that really pulls them together. Like, I think the poison needle one could work for the sense it seems like that's supposed to convey (anxiety to the point of physical discomfort) if they had doubled down on it but now it's just a weird hairstyle. I'm no fiction writer, but:

>Billie felt needles in every brush of her hair, of her clothes, in the people's eyes. The poison rushed in until she could hardly stand, could hardly speak or breathe over a swollen tongue, could hardly even see, and every cell was screaming "Give up!"

>>4740

That's how I was feeling too. Detailing a feeling in more, plainer words instead of linking typically distant words would force a more concrete image into my head. That's what it's about in the end, right? Making words feel like experiences.

It seems like the only way to make that happen is to write something and test it out on people until you learn the secret code of your readers.

>>4739
>her eyes are bags of bleach
What the fuck does that even mean?

>>4743
It means sushi roll ran out of analogies.

Here I sit attentively at my beautifully jet black Thinkpad T420 docked into a equally black monitor tying words and daydreaming about a world where I only have to work for 10 hours a week or less and medical bills are a distant memory. My mouth is desiring a tasty beverage and the memes on my computer are the dankest since 2013. I get up still in the middle of my fantasy of short work days and playing video games with family and friends to pick up a cold glass of pink lemonade which reflected my face, all torn up from debt and I let the tangy taste slid down my throat with my eyes closed. When I opened my eyes, I was standing in front of Karl Marx. His powerful beard dwarfing my own radiated a vibe I had never experienced before. I felt my troubles vanish, my glass had disappeared, my hair stood up in the face of his power. "Comrade, you must use your technology to cease the means of production, you must tell your managers they are now useless! Enrich your life and everyone else's!"

I found myself back into the kitchen, now calm. I walk back to my computer without another thought besides, "What the fuck was in that lemonade?".

Part of the reason it sounds bad is because every single sentence has the exact same structure: "X is Y". It's fine to use simple metaphors, but not four in a row.

>>4751
Weighted eyelids falling akin to the resolve of a besieged citadel. Troops of attention wander battlements aimlessly observing. Reports trickle to and fro declaring the confirmation of consistent clearance contaminated by curious contendors at the pallisades. The people made weak and despondent from fatigue and vacant sustinence. Companions are since consumed. Comforts set ablaze for fleeting warmth of hazed light beneath the cage of stars. There is no relief force but the frosts of a distant winter, endurance the only weapon in the arsenal.

I am bored.

The original passage comes from this video at 00:45.

>>4739
I don't know about evoking emotion as i barely ever feel anything while reading, besides fun and hype for what is to come but i could imagine Billie's well; a girl with soft wobbly legs, stiff hair and spongy tongue and white eyes. Maybe i can even say she is afraid all the time, so her legs shake, doesn't take care for her body so her hair is in a poor state and her tongue dry and because of her poor state of mind she has a vague blank stare.
This excerp needs more background though, i won't say it is good or bad, just lacking when alone by itself.

>>4754
This advice isn't awful, but you'll get much, much more out of actually reading and analyzing the methods of books and passages that you find powerful, although criticizing and rewriting weak writing as people have been doing in this thread is also valuable.

>>4752
A good example of sentence variation. You actually used many different verbs instead of using the word "are" four times.

>>4754
>The point of prose fiction is to waste the reader's time
huh. had me fooled

>>4763
That picture reminds me of of the instructions my professors used to tell their students. I think they were tired of students using advanced words when simpler ones would've been enough.

>>4764
What kind of school did you go to? My English teachers always told the class to exchange simple words for "better" (i.e. more obscure, not more descriptive) ones, and also to put in lots of adverbs. They had posters of fancy words (ironically titled "Wow Words") in all the classrooms (They also didn't like me using parentheses very much).

>>4765
University. Philosophy and history professors. The idea was that it would be easier for people to understand you if you used more more common words, and many students didn't seem to understand the words they used that well either.

>>4766
Writing in a manner to make your work accessible isn't really what the thread is about though. It's to mess about and have fun with words isn't it?

>>4765
Read "A Case for Small Words" by Richard Lederer, you might reconsider your stance.

>>4767
Depends on why you write. There is a time and place for everything. It is better to be understood correctly with simple words when you're trying to argue for or against the use of road salt, if you're writing a journal, stories, or poems, playful writing is certainly welcome. You don't have to dive into the thesaurus for the longest most convoluted words to be playful tho, simple "homely" words is often just as good, or even better. Choosing longer and more foreign words might work against you.

>>4769
That's what I just said.
Writing to be easily understood is very important in many places but this thread is not one of them. So to give writing advice of such a method is counter productive here.

>>4739
Billie sounds fucked up

>>4810
Yeah… Hey billie! Are you doing ok?

>>4739
Badly written metaphors with no flow to them, this honestly sounds like something a grade schooler would write. Metaphors should generally be weaved into a sentece rather than just left to stand on their own, and like >>4751 pointed out, they're also practically identical.

>>4828
"…her eyes are bags of bleach." What does this mean? I've never seen a bag of bleach I don't think, but it doesn't sound good.

>>4739
I kinda get it. My interpretation is that Billie is a nasty woman. But the legs being noodles doesn't fit and the eyes being bags of bleach just doesn't make sense. Are they puffy but not brightly colored? Does it mean she smokes a lot of cigarettes?

>Descriptive writing
Reminds me of a passage from Terry Prattchet's Discworld #2 book The Light Fantastic:
"The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entireliy accurate and during the reign of Olaf
Quimby II is Patrician of Ankh some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to put a stop
to this sort of thing and introduce some honesty into reporting. Thus, if a legend said of a
notable hero that 'all men spoke of his prowess' any bard who valued his life would add hastily
'except for a couple of people in his home village who thought he was a liar, and quite a lot of
other people who had never really heard of him.' Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements
like 'his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind n a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,' and
any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be
backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne. "

Don't be afraid to let your reader's imagination and/or autism spectrum disorder do the work for you! You can get way more flavor out of mere voice than you can imagery so why not let the reader have some fun with the details? There's only so many things that you can compare weak legs to but there's all kinds of different people who could try to describe the same thing:

>Billie's shit is fucked all the fuck to hell and she should probably see a doctor regarding said fuckedness at sometime within the near future.

>Billie is looking like a 200lb. bag of oof and she's walking like one, too.

>Literally everything about Billie is currently either gross, pathetic or all of the above. It's hysterical.

Treat your story like a conversation. How people respond to you affects how they respond to what you have to say. Your personality is just another tool of communication and it takes an engaging narrator to relay an engaging narrative.

Time for scorched earth..

>>4765
Large words usually have more specific connotations than smaller ones. They demand and create specific contexts to be used. "Big" and "large" almost always work, but "gargantuan" means something specific, and sometimes you don't want specific. In fact, unless you specifically want specificity, you probably don't need it.

One reason I left the Patent Office was that while there were a lot of good people there, it did attract its share of weirdos. I could go on for pages, but this one weirdo is the case-in-point.

Today, he would be called an incel or gamer or geek. He was a 30-something male, overweight and unkempt, who was lazy and didn't do his job and blamed everyone else for his woes. You know, your average computer geek male in 2022. He was fat, he was slovenly, and one habit in particular drove me nuts.

He would go down to the basement mall in Crystal City and buy these "big gulp" soda-pops in plastic cups. You get to keep the cup! And he did. He would gulp this soda and then have a burping contest. I am not kidding about this. He would belch, loudly, and actually open the door to his office and lean out into the hallway so it would echo throughout the floor. And I am not talking about a small burp, but these long, drawn-out, "Burrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap! kind of things.

Gross. But it got worse.

He kept the cups in his office - unwashed - and stacked them up in the corner. As a result, we had an infestation of cockroaches in the office, and that was gross, too. I mentioned this to my boss and since the guy was in another Art Unit, there was nothing to be done, as his supervisor (who was also slovenly and stupid) didn't see it as a problem but thought it was "funny" and that I needed to "lighten up."

Of course, the guy was mortgaging cases - he was a lazy slob, so he would pretend to examine cases to meet his quota and avoid being fired (he was always 1% above the level of production needed to keep his job). And eventually it was discovered that, gee-whiz, whaddya know? He's a scumbag!

Interesting thing that. I read all the time online about people being harassed and bullied at work, and supervisors and managers who defend the bullies and harassers. Later on, they find out the miscreants were stealing from the company. Maybe when someone complains about boorish behavior in the workplace, you should pay attention. The guy harassing the secretary isn't just a "jerk" or being "inappropriate" - he probably isn't doing his job, either. When you have enough time in the day to stir the pot, chances are, you don't have enough to do. Just fire people like that - if they feel so entitled they can get away with whatever they want - and you let them - they will probably be your downfall.

Just a thought.

Anyway, I can't say this guy is the one reason I left the Patent Office, but one of many. I wanted to buy a house and my salary at the USPTO wasn't going to cut it. I wanted to get ahead in life, and slogging my way up the GS salary scale over 30 years didn't seem so appealing. I wanted more out of life than a tiny office with linoleum floors and steel furniture made by convicted Watergate buglers in minimum-security prisons.

I wanted to work with professionals who didn't think burping contests were the height of hilarity.

So I moved on. Years later, I was interviewing for a job with a firm, sort of as a lark, and they mentioned that Mr. Burpee was working for them. I laughed out loud. They quickly qualified that they kept him in a separate room in another floor, because basically he smelled bad. They used him to write responses to Office Actions (for foreign clients, who basically tell you what to say) and since he was fired from the Patent Office, he could never be a Registered Patent Attorney Patent Agent, or even Lawyer.

Well, actually he could. He tried to become a registered Patent Agent and on the application form was a question, "Have you ever been fired from a government agency?" and he put down "No" as if the Patent Office wouldn't notice. It was an interesting case, as they basically banned him for life from becoming a registered agent not because he was fired for malfeasance, but because he lied about it on a government form.

>>9790
Screeching like a new-born phoenix

"An electricity pylon is pulled down near Martinstown, in Winterbourne, England, on September 30, 2022. The National Grid has started to remove 22 pylons and 8.8 kilometers of overhead cable to transform views of the Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The Going Underground project is one of the first schemes in the world to remove high-voltage electricity-transmission infrastructure solely to enhance the landscape. "
One of the Photos of the Week from The Atlantic

Did you hear that Elon Musk dug a tunnel under the Las Vegas Convention Center?

I think it is pretty universally known by now that the "Las Vegas Loop" is impractical, poorly thought out, and generally an embarrassment to society and industry. I will spare an accounting of the history and future of the system, but I will give a bit of context for the unfamiliar reader. The Las Vegas Loop is a (supposed) mass-transit system built and operated by The Boring Company for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Besides four (ish) stations in the Convention Center, it has been expanded to serve Resorts World as well. It will, according to plan, be expanded to as many as 93 stops throughout the Las Vegas metropolitan area, despite the mayor of Las Vegas calling it "impractical" and "unsafe and inaccessible." This odd contradiction comes about because The Boring Company is footing a very large portion of the construction cost, while much of the rest is coming from casinos and resorts, making it extremely inexpensive for regional government agencies.

In practice, the Loop consists of a set of mostly double-bore tunnels of small diameter, which are traversed by Tesla Model 3 and Tesla Model X vehicles manually driven by humans at up to 40 mph. They have more recently switched to Model Y, but the operations manual I have predates that change, so let's stick with the older models for consistency. Each vehicle seats up to four. The system is nominally a PRT, or personal rapid transit, as the drivers take you to the specific station you request. The tunnel to Resorts World is single bore, and can admit vehicles in only one direction. A simple signaling scheme serves to prevent vehicles meeting head-on in single tunnels. While Loop and Boring Company marketing focuses heavily on the single underground station, all other stations are above ground. In the current state, I think it is actually somewhat generous to call the Loop an underground system, as most maneuvers and operations occur at surface level. It is perhaps best thought of as a taxi system that makes use of underground connectors to bypass traffic. Future expansion plans involve significantly more tunnel length and more underground stations, which will probably cause the system overall to feel more like a below-surface transit system and less like an odd fleet of hotel courtesy cars.

I am not going to provide a general review of the system, because many others have, and you can probably already guess what I think of it. Instead, I want to focus on some aspects that have not been as heavily discussed in other reporting: detailed operational practices, and safety and communications technology.

We are fortunate that, as part of its fire safety permitting, the Loop has been required to file its operations manual with Clark County. Unfortunately, the newest revision I can find online is 2021's Revision 7, which predates the Resorts World station and may be out of date in other ways as well. Still, it appears to be substantially correct, and much of what I will discuss is based on Revision 7 of the manual alongside several trips I have taken in the system.

Interestingly, the operations manual refers to the system only as the "Campus-Wide People Mover" or CWPM. This term seems to date to the original solicitations by LVCVA, but is not used in marketing.

>>19339
The punch line here is… remember what my husband said about the golf cart we saw? GEM makes carts that seat five in addition to the driver, with a higher seating position and open sides or optionally large doors for faster board/deboard. Even with the 25mph stock speed limiter for NEV/LSV regulatory compliance (and believe me, with some adjustments to the motor controller they can go faster), I suspect that switching the Loop entirely to GEMs would increase its total capacity. And the GEMs honestly suck, in the world of light electric vehicles. They just kind of pulled off a regulatory capture move and got the NEV rules written to pretty much require something that sucks as much as they do for street legality.

Subjective Experience
So as I said, this is not a review, just trying to focus on some things of interest to transit, communications, and policy dweebs. Which I assume pretty much describes my core readers. But I do want to point out a couple of oddities that add to the "wow, this is cheap" sensation:

The ride is surprisingly rough, even in a Model Y with highway-grade suspension. I am concerned that they may not be able to do much better when paving in the confined tunnels, given that I don't think standard paving equipment would fit in the loading gauge. The ride experience was not "oooo electric car luxury," it was more on par with the Orlando Airport APM100s with sketchy steering gear.

For the segment that requires tickets (to Resorts World), the ticketing system is based on a QR code. The customer-side implementation is fine enough, but the ticket checking is laughable. It's an iPad where you have to show a QR code to the front-facing camera, meaning you have to present the QR code with your phone facing away from you, looking at the image on the iPad for alignment. It is very awkward and there is no reason for it besides cheapness. Plus there's not really any way for the attendant to see if the ticket is valid without standing awkwardly close to you to look at the same iPad screen you are, and indeed, I accidentally scored a free ride by merit of the attendant's inability to see the actual result of the ticket check.

The stations are not especially well thought out. People walking in and out of the stations have to cross the path of the Loop vehicles in some places. The attendants are supposed to direct people and, for trips to Resorts World, collect fare, but the design of some stations lacks a chokepoint at which to do so. The attendants have to kind of chase people down after they've already walked straight to a vehicle.

The tunnel to Resorts World is one-way. Its portal is connected to the West LVCC station by a tunnel, but the station and the Resorts World portal are actually in the same parking lot. They seem to have adopted a practice of cars one way going through the tunnel, and cars the other way just driving… across the parking lot. This is very funny to experience and contributes a lot to the feeling that the Loop is only marginally an underground system. I doubt the original designers intended for this outcome, it seems like the money spent on the connecting tunnel was completely wasted, but I'm assuming that eliminating one segment of single-track tunnel helped with throughput. Their approach to managing traffic at the Resorts World portal also involves a sort of approach-pattern-esque architecture where every car has to drive in a circle around the portal before entering, which is funny.

This stuff matters in my mind because it gets to the question of what the Loop… is for? The capacity of the Loop is very low. The expansion plan calls for a lot of tunnels, doubled up for capacity in places, but targets only 90k passengers per day. That would put it at around 8x the current daily ridership of the monorail, but with a vastly larger network of stations. Presumably they will expand fare collection, and I would have to think that tickets will actually become fairly expensive. so it's probably not intended to be a high-capacity, low-cost option.

So what else could it be? Well, some press and discussion around the Loop figures it as more of a luxury option: something that casinos can comp for high rollers, that will spare people dealing with the general disaster of getting around the strip. But it also doesn't feel like that. The outdoor stations, need to quickly board and deboard a sedan, and general chaos level of the stations (i.e. attendant chasing you down for ticket) make it feel more "courtesy car" than "black car."

I don't know, they could totally dress it up a bit and make it feel fancier. Some paint here and there, train the attendants better, do more to direct traffic. They could! But right now I think the best way to describe the Las Vegas Loop is… "cheap and amateurish." Surprisingly fitting with the Las Vegas vibe, in a way.

California’s new electric train makes for a shockingly better trip—we tried it
Caltrain’s electric trains started rolling out last week. The advantages go far beyond just cutting CO2 emissions.
California’s new electric train makes for a shockingly better trip—we tried it
[Photo: Caltrain]
BY ADELE PETERS

If you ride on the newest commuter trains from San Francisco to San Jose, the first thing that you might notice is how quiet they are: Instead of the rumble of a diesel engine, the trains now run on 100% electricity.

By switching to electric trains, Caltrain, the rail service, can eliminate 250,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions a year, roughly as much as the pollution from 55,000 cars. But it’s also just a better experience for riders. That might convince more commuters to stop driving to work, cutting emissions even further.


[Photo: Caltrain]
ELECTRIC TRAINS ARE FASTER
First, the electric trains run faster than the diesel trains that they’re replacing. Instead of a single locomotive in the front pulling the entire train behind it, each individual car is now an “electrical multiple unit,” or EMU, with its own engine, connected to overhead electric wires. “It’s generating power throughout the system,” says Dan Lieberman, a public information officer for Caltrain. “It just allows it to get up to speed much faster.”

Because the train can start and stop faster, Caltrain can add more stops to its express trains, and still shave minutes off the route. The new express route between San Jose and San Francisco will stop at 11 stations instead of seven, and take 59 minutes instead of an hour and five minutes. (The local train will take 75 minutes rather than 100 minutes.) During peak commute hours, more stations will now have trains every 15 to 20 minutes, even though Caltrain won’t use any additional trains. At off-peak hours, trains will run every 30 minutes, rather than every hour. (Caltrain started rolling out the new trains last week; they’ll be fully in service by the end of September.)

>>19367
If you ride on the newest commuter trains from San Francisco to San Jose, the first thing that you might notice is how quiet they are: Instead of the rumble of a diesel engine, the trains now run on 100% electricity.

By switching to electric trains, Caltrain, the rail service, can eliminate 250,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions a year, roughly as much as the pollution from 55,000 cars. But it’s also just a better experience for riders. That might convince more commuters to stop driving to work, cutting emissions even further.


[Photo: Caltrain]
ELECTRIC TRAINS ARE FASTER
First, the electric trains run faster than the diesel trains that they’re replacing. Instead of a single locomotive in the front pulling the entire train behind it, each individual car is now an “electrical multiple unit,” or EMU, with its own engine, connected to overhead electric wires. “It’s generating power throughout the system,” says Dan Lieberman, a public information officer for Caltrain. “It just allows it to get up to speed much faster.”

Because the train can start and stop faster, Caltrain can add more stops to its express trains, and still shave minutes off the route. The new express route between San Jose and San Francisco will stop at 11 stations instead of seven, and take 59 minutes instead of an hour and five minutes. (The local train will take 75 minutes rather than 100 minutes.) During peak commute hours, more stations will now have trains every 15 to 20 minutes, even though Caltrain won’t use any additional trains. At off-peak hours, trains will run every 30 minutes, rather than every hour. (Caltrain started rolling out the new trains last week; they’ll be fully in service by the end of September.)

Among the decades-old Windows apps to get renewed attention from Microsoft during the Windows 11 era is Notepad, the basic built-in text editor that was much the same in early 2021 as it had been in the '90 and 2000s. Since then, it has gotten a raft of updates, including a visual redesign, spellcheck and autocorrect, and window tabs.

Given Microsoft's continuing obsession with all things AI, it's perhaps not surprising that the app's latest update (currently in preview for Canary and Dev Windows Insiders) is a generative AI feature called Rewrite that promises to adjust the length, tone, and phrasing of highlighted sentences or paragraphs using generative AI. Users will be offered three rewritten options based on what they've highlighted, and they can select the one they like best or tell the app to try again.

Rewrite appears to be based on the same technology as the Copilot assistant, since it uses cloud-side processing (rather than your local CPU, GPU, or NPU) and requires Microsoft account sign-in to work. The initial preview is available to users in the US, France, the UK, Canada, Italy, and Germany.

If you don't care about AI or you don't sign in with a Microsoft account, note that Microsoft is also promising substantial improvements in launch time with this version of Notepad. "Most users will see app launch times improve by more than 35 percent, with some users seeing improvements of 55 percent or more," reads the blog post by Microsoft's Windows apps manager Dave Grochocki.

Microsoft is also adding generative fill and erase features to Paint in this update; the Paint app has already picked up several AI-powered image-generation and editing features. The generative fill addition allows users to select part of an existing image and type a prompt to fill in that area of the image with something AI-generated. Generative erase does the opposite, removing objects from a selected area of the image and attempting to recreate the background. The difference between the two is that generative fill is only available on Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon X Elite chips in them, while generative erase will work on any Windows 11 PC.

On the technical end of things, a new Windows Insider Canary channel build released yesterday adds some new features to Prism, Microsoft's rebranded x86-to-Arm app translation layer for Arm-powered Windows PCs like the Snapdragon X Elite-powered Surface Pro and Surface Laptop.

This Prism update adds support for newer x86 CPU instructions important for running games and high-end professional apps, including support for the AVX and AVX2 extensions. Microsoft says these extensions are already available in Windows 11 24H2 specifically to support Adobe's Premiere Pro app, but this new update will enable these extensions (among others) for all apps.

Prism still doesn't support AVX512 extensions, though even modern Intel processors have mostly dropped support for these over the last few years. The new extensions are only available to fully 64-bit Intel apps, and not 32-bit apps or "a 64-bit app that uses a 32-bit helper to detect CPU feature support."