Recent content by petermarkley

Thank you but I feel safe expressing myself to a certain degree in public online where I think my family is unlikely to see. I do want to have a voice and go on record to at least a certain extent, and my family tends pretty strongly to stay in their bubble.

By the way, I will mention something, in passing (because I’d rather not open the can of worms too far). Another (more indirect) outcome from my time debunking flat earth is that I am now agnostic on the question of young-earth creationism vs. evolutionary creationism. Maybe I’ve just been...

Honestly I’m a lot more fatigued from flat earthers’ nonsense now than I was when I first joined NerdZone. I spent a year and a half, created a semi-enduring body of work addressing the topic, and tried almost wholly in vain to improve the tone of discourse. I got some positive recognition from...

Klingon is somebody else’s problem 😉 I’m going to be using it for Chetnum and Inluaita, the languages in my graphic novel Eithalica

I previously mentioned that I was working on an app called Tollerus that lets you build your own conlang. Well, I finally finished and released it. I created a website at https://tollerus.tools and posted a demo video: Hopefully somebody finds it useful! 🍸

Yes, the homeless man in my story was named Franklin. This was in 2011. I was 18 years old, having grown up in the country, and had just recently moved to a downtown apartment in Cleveland Ohio. My job was within walking distance so I often met homeless people on the street asking for money and...

Seems to me like you probably handled it pretty well. Sometimes there’s an unknown amount of risk, to not only ourselves but also potentially the stranger asking for money (e.g. if they’ll use it for drugs etc.). That means there’s almost no “right” answer that perfectly balances the need for...

(@Hitcore Remember: if AI wrote that and you don’t disclose, the YouTube angel of death will come after you … 💀)

This actually seems like good news to me. I generally agree that this increased enforcement (ideally) shouldn’t be done by AI, because it’s unfair toward the (tiny minority of) legitimate creators in those niches. That’s unfortunate. But 99% of content in those niches is NOT the result of real...

Since you weren’t at first aware of the positive shift in uses of “nerd,” I might as well ask if you were aware of its expanding scope too? Nowadays it doesn’t just mean someone interested in books or computers. Just think of how in the 60s or 70s, kids who read comic books were considered...

Hopefully this doesn’t make you feel old, but it seems to me like it’s been almost my entire lifetime that the positive uses of “nerd” outweighed the bad uses in casual discourse … I honestly can’t remember the last time I heard “nerd” used in a negative way except: by a frat boy or sports...

I feel like I should say this now before I regret not saying it later. When we were considering “xenforums” or even “discussiondock,” I was more ambivalent. And of course I can’t know for sure what would’ve happened in a counterfactual reality… But right now I feel like if Nerd Zone had been...

I can’t help but notice a possible lesson for us all here, that good branding is hard. 😉 This is why it constitutes an entire professional career field, which I daresay is often taken for granted…

There’s also the fact that in the branding world, three action verbs (or adjectives) with each followed by a period is the only thing possibly more cliched than a misspelled word. I literally tweeted about this exact cliche back in 2014, over 11 years ago:

(I’m not that invested either way, just wanted to offer that point of view which it seems like you acknowledge. So… 🤷‍♂️)