Oh fair enough haha - I usually read your stuff 2-3 times before the meaning sinks in, and I guess I never quite grokked it this time (other than the theme "old mcdonald") :-)

In Emacs, to do the same, you set the "fill-column" value to a desired column number, and then hit Alt-Q as often as you please.

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~inquiry wrote (thread):

Oh fair enough haha - I usually read your stuff 2-3

times before the meaning sinks in, and I guess I never

quite grokked it this time (other than the theme "old

mcdonald") :-)

As I've already whined abundantly, I'm not sure we ever know when we've *really* grokked others' words. That's not to say we're not often convinced we have. But surely there's essentially infinite conflict of interest in our evaluation. ;-)

I'm vaguely remembering someone responding to one of my 1990s newsgroup posts with something like "Do ya *have* to be so effing enigmatic?"

But, see, it wasn't that I was going out of my way to be enigmatic. It was more an unscientific approach to seeing who would make extra grokking effort as sort of gauge of who I'd want to correspond with.

Of late, that attitude is tempered (although sometimes it feels more like annihilated..) by having realized that I've been following/studying the stuff that "really does it for me" for on the order of over four *decades*, and so it's unreasonable to expect anyone who hasn't could just suddenly "get it" in a sufficiently "sympathetically vibratory" way.

In Emacs, to do the same, you set the "fill-column" value

to a desired column number, and then hit Alt-Q as often

as you please.

Heh. You've got me remembering back to what I believe was the early 1990s agonizing over whether to go all in on emacs or vi. I loved the emacs lisp aspect. But I concluded I'd likely not use it as much as I imagined, or could at least accomplish the same in less - oh what the hell - enigmatic :-) ways in perl through vi stdin/stdout mechanisms. And vi felt like less - or at least less gnarly - keystrokes, and I've definitely a dominant minimalism chromosome.