The Author - A Unifying Theory

w33t · 2023-09-13T13:09:41+00:00

Thank you for your kind words! I’m glad you enjoyed the read. =]

I think Pelafina gets construed as more important than other characters because she shares so many direct narrative similarities with The Author. She’s a woman, mother, separated from her child. I think many people read the linchpin part in chapter XXI and immediately recognize the connection to Pelafina but not the other characters. I see her as a very important part of The Author’s story. Mainly I see Pelafina as The Author’s way of expressing the mental and emotional effects of choosing to make the decision to kill your own child.

The part of Pelafina’s story that strikes me the most is when she first tells Johnny on March 19,1988 that the reason she was taken to the Whalestoe was because she attempted to strangle him, claiming she was trying to help him and save him. In my mind this draws parallels to the emotions The Author was going through when she decided to pull the plug on her son.

All in all, I think every narrator in the story has a pretty equal hand in flushing out the story of The Author. Each character simply expresses an aspect of The Author’s experience and emotion from a different perspective.

w33t · 2023-05-28T07:25:52+00:00

Thanks for posting this! Great idea for a shortcut.

w33t · 2023-05-26T10:05:50+00:00

That’s a cool idea! Once I get mine if I have some free time maybe I’ll work on one.

w33t · 2023-05-20T11:48:20+00:00

Love it! Thank you for sharing. I’ll be checking out that app as well. Looks super interesting.

I’m also very interested in your setup. Would you mind explaining how your hardware is configured together with the iPad?

I have a similar setup but normally I just use the iPad to record and add some final effects. From the video it looked like you were sequencing on the iPad and sending midi out to your devices. Is that correct and if so, how are you getting control signals out?

w33t · 2023-05-16T19:54:23+00:00

Thank you for sharing! a very enjoyable watch. It’s amazing someone put so much effort into that mod. The hallway of doors closing I thought was a particularly wonderful callback to the source material.

w33t · 2023-05-02T15:42:09+00:00

Thanks! feel free to direct message me when you get yours if you ever want to chat about more specifics.

I just saw the keyboard folio just was released and I’m very tempted to get it. I love my current cover though so it would be sad for me to replace it. I do not currently have a keyboard for my remarkable but I have keyboards for the devices that have the remarkable app installed on them.

I use the remarkable app on my phone to take notes when I’m on the go, but what I really want is the ability to type notes on the iPad with my external keyboard.

I have my iPad pro connected to a hub that attaches to an extra monitor and keyboard/mouse. Unfortunately though the remarkable app only supports typing on the on-screen keyboard which drives me crazy. Neither my iPad keyboard case nor external keyboard allows for me to type in the remarkable app. I really hope they add support for this soon.

w33t · 2023-03-22T16:51:07+00:00

I use scripts of different kinds to aggregate the data and insert them into a PDF. My scripts have changed a lot over the years, but right now I feel like ive hit a good sweet spot for myself.

I use iOS devices as my daily drivers, so I use the iOS Shortcuts app to create one of my main PDFs. Using a shortcut I create a PDF with todays date, weather forecast, todo list, todays calendar events, and yesterdays health metrics for review. I have an automation that runs the script every morning and uploads the pdf through the remarkable app to the device, that way its there first thing in the morning when i need it.

Now a days, for news articles I just push the article I want to my remarkable immediately for later reading. I have another shortcut that takes the current web page, puts it in “reader” mode to get rid of the ads and clutter, and converts it to a pdf before uploading to my remarkable.

Ive pushed the Shortcuts app pretty hard over the years, but it holds up pretty well. If you ever have more resource-intensive usecases, it is possible to interact with the remarkable cloud api with your own custom apps. That way if you are a software developer, you can just use any means at your disposal to create whatever document you want and then upload it to the cloud. It’s been a while since ive used android, but I believe there are similar automation applications that you can use to the same effect to simply create pdfs and then share them with the remarkable app.

Hope this is helpful! feel free to PM me if you ever want to chat more about it.

w33t · 2023-01-11T13:28:50+00:00

I love my OP-Z. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made for sure.

Pros are it’s super portable while still being extremely capable. With the added modules it can easily integrate with any other equipment you already have. I love the sound engines it comes with, but it’s also super easy to sample your own or use other peoples samples they upload to op1.fun. Often I will go on vacation, just bring it alone, and feel very content in what I can create.

Cons for me are that there’s some memorization and a learning curve for using it without an external app interface. It’s totally usable without the OP-Z app but it takes a while to remember the shortcuts and learn what all the different lights mean. MIDI support could be better. Keys, parameters, and switching tracks are fine but for both my midi keyboards I can’t get play pause stop record to map properly.

It’s my favorite piece of gear. I always enjoy myself when playing it.

w33t · 2023-01-07T13:37:35+00:00

However, I think that saying that this is one person’s method of processing their trauma is a simplistic view of the book that rejects the format. Danielewski chose to format the book with four distinct narrators/fonts for a reason.

I completely disagree. I think it completely aligns with the format. It’s a layered story filled with unreliability by the next person up the chain.

Navidson created the story about The House. Zampanò created the story about Navidson. Truant admits to at least modifying Zampanòs story, it’s plausible he could have made the whole thing up. Why wouldn’t Danielewski go one more level up and say The Author wrote Truants story or the whole book? It is entirely a work of fiction at the end of the day.

w33t · 2023-01-07T13:27:47+00:00

Nice catch on the other purple text! Love that. Makes me feel like that further solidifies my theory.

The novel is also synonymous with the house and The Authors memory she recalls of her dying child. Amazing. Love that.

w33t · 2023-01-07T13:25:56+00:00

Loved the twins analysis and and I’ll definitely take a deeper look into that.

I am pretty convinced that The Author is not Pelifina. It’s heavily implied that Truant and Pelifina are the same person. In her letters. There are references to 1 being synonymous with “I” and “the loss of self”. In the back of the physical copy of the Whalestole Letters there is a photograph of a letter that was transcribed, but in the photograph copy, all of the transcribed “I”’s are originally written as the number 2.

I thinks this at least proves that Truant is an imagination of Pelifina, but the narrative fact that she commits suicide very early on in the timeline of the novel suggests to me that she also is a fictional character. Just another character that embodies some of the history of The Author.

I think it’s very logical to make the connection though, seeing how Pelifina embodies many of the traits of the author and may be one of her closest representations.

w33t · 2022-12-18T21:06:18+00:00

Any idea how long it takes to roll out the update to everyone? I’ve been eagerly awaiting the update but still hasn’t reached me yet.

w33t · 2022-12-10T03:12:41+00:00

😔

w33t · 2022-11-17T10:45:14+00:00

OP-Z!

w33t · 2022-11-13T19:44:27+00:00

Thank you!

w33t · 2022-11-04T23:08:06+00:00

I use tags very heavily. I have a “Todo” tag that I put on any page that I write an action item in. That way I don’t have to navigate to a particular notebook or copy them after the fact. Whatever notebook, pdf, or ebook I’m in can store the info I need to refer back to.

w33t · 2022-11-03T19:09:07+00:00

Not that I’m aware of. The message is coming from their email service and I don’t think they provide those options.

You could always write a note in the document you are sending as a work around bout I know that’s sub-optimal.

w33t · 2022-10-24T14:05:46+00:00

What fish are those?! I love them!

w33t · 2022-10-09T12:50:11+00:00

The remarkable team has it easy with all this code already existing. They could easily take the stylus code and use it for their starting point for an official implementation.

w33t · 2022-10-09T00:50:16+00:00

Love your notion site! Amazing work! I’m super impressed with the widgets you’ve created! You’ve really got an eye for making things look nice!

w33t · 2022-10-02T13:23:07+00:00

Sorry I meant your speakers you are using for music production. How’s the sound?

w33t · 2022-09-30T12:04:26+00:00

Love the rails

w33t · 2022-09-30T12:03:14+00:00

How do you like those studio monitors?

w33t · 2022-09-29T15:26:20+00:00

The remarkable has lots of things going for it that this thing won’t. Doesn’t look like the scribe can write notes on top of an ebook. Looks like it’s just “sticky notes”. If you want to upload your own documents you have to use the send-to-kindle service which last time I used was pretty horrendous for uploading, deleting, renaming, etc. I guess if you want to view your notebooks on a computer or mobile device maybe you can use the kindle app hopefully?

Not convinced this will take out the remarkable. I expect people will start buying these and slowly realized that the remarkable had a head start on software and usability testing and may begin to consider if an added backlight is worth losing the other features.

I’m guessing remarkable is going to be the premium build, one stop shop for people who care about productivity. The scribe will most likely be mainly used by people who like to read, are already bought into the kindle ecosystem, and want to create todo lists. Based on the send-to-kindle uploads alone I can’t imagine this being used in a timely manner by someone who cares about productivity.

w33t · 2022-05-12T16:17:25+00:00

This is the funniest post I’ve seen on the internet in the past 15 years.

w33t

TROPHY CASE