Updated 03-Aug-2025 Style guides are just that, guides or guidelines to maintain a particular style of presentation. Guides instruct on correct usage. They are essential for maintaining consistency of an organizations and brands presentation across various media. Because of a proliferation of media, as well as media-specific goals on the Internet (aka search and social ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 This is part of McNeill and Beyond - a Memoir If we go back far enough, our ancestors are from Africa, as are everyone else's. For Y-DNA (our patrilineal line) this means ~ 110,000 years ago there is what we would call an anthropological commonality. Between the anthropological and the genealogical (stories of ... Read more
Updated 11-Aug-2025 Memoir Preface This is an extended essay. It is not complete, the work is ongoing in fits and starts. It contains three parts. The first part is a genealogy and genetic forensics in searching for my male ancestral line. It centers on our emigrant ancestor John McNeill (1680-1765) who emigrated to the American ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Audiobooks are generally a neglected/emerging area in much of the world. If one is in the US, of course it is less of a problem, but even Apple has a half-assed approach currently. Apple / iOS / OSX While it appears Apple is trying to get its act together, it is a far ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 While there is quite a bit of literary genre everywhere alive and well, there are certain publication genre which are not. The Chapbook (still popular) and the Almanac(k), as well but we don't hear about it much anymore. Chapbook in the Age of Print-on-Demand The Chapbook seems like a wonder in the age ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 This is a permanent page about style guides used in writing and for marketing. In particular there two kinds of Style Guides: - Brand Style Guide (for product designers, pr types, and all public and corporate communications) - Publishing Style Guide (for writers, editors, publishers) These two intersect and the Brand Style Guide ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Visual Studio Code Editor -- aka vscode, code -- is my current editor of choice. I used the venerable Atom editor for a number of years. Both use Electron as the platform for development, aka node/js/css. Atom was a Facebook project which has since been abandoned. It is very similar, and not difficult ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 I use Markdown daily. The flavor I use is Markdown Extra. I use this in WordPress websites with a very old (2013) version of the Markdown Extra plugin, which simply continues to work. I also use this in local files that I then turn into epub and pdf files using Pandoc, which supports ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 See also Managing Fonts in Debian Note: All else being equal, select TTFs if they are hinted, and OTF fonts if not. Note: Symlink in fonts to /usr/share/fonts and fc-cache -fv in Debian and other Linux. Note: For managing fonts in Debian, see Managing Fonts in Debian Fonts, Typeface, and Typography -- what ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 A famous writer (Borges) once said that he imagined the afterlife (or more precisely Paradise) to be a kind of library. However, what occurs to me now (in at once a banal and deeply moving way) is that not only the afterlife, but Life is a kind of Library. I mean this both ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Yes, screen promiscuous, a term I did not know before reading the piece on Snowpiercer in the LA Times. Short and Longform Trends As John Borthwick reports there are two trends in media consumption seemingly at odds, lots of micro/immediate shortform content being consumed and reflected, as well as longform, quality content that ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Fifteen years ago, Sundays were best spent on the bed with too much coffee and the Sunday New York Times, a massive amount of information. Indeed, it has been said that the Sunday New York Times holds more information than the average serf in the Middle Ages encountered in their lifetime. Occasionally we ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Now available on Github Download WP Fountain from WordPress.org WP Fountain is a WordPress Plugin to support Fountain markup< (aka SPMD) for screenplays. Contributors: jeffmcneill, nyousefi Tags: screenwriting, scrippets, scrippet, screenplay, film scripts, movie scripts, fountain Requires at least: 1.5 Tested up to: 3.6 Stable tag: 0.0.1 This plugin modifies screenplay format text ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Aging vision blurs other senses compensate impending changes within are felt, as tremors preceding earthquakes without
Updated 03-Aug-2025 I was reading an obituary on on Jim Carroll (Basketball Diaries) and it seemed a lot more personal and less like I was reading history. I think I've reached "middle age" (วัยกลาง). Was compelled to write this in my notebook: Somehow I've muddled into middle age. Evidence: I read obituaries, become bored with ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Ozymandias I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 It's coming to America first, the cradle of the best and of the worst. It's here they got the range and the machinery for change and it's here they got the spiritual thirst. It's here the family's broken and it's here the lonely say that the heart has got to open in a ... Read more