u/RandomDigitalSponge

I had the CD for years. I can’t believe looking for this I find out she passed away. 😢

I love the iPad Pro, but I’m missing out on Steam and I don’t have a PC. I have an old intel iMac which still runs well enough.

Anyway, other than watching movies in bed, I’d like to be able to play games. I don’t play things that are heavy on graphics or multiplayer stuff. Just artsy indie games with hand drawn animation, basically the kind of stuff you find in the app store. So, just like with movies, color and brightness are key.

What can I find out there that won’t cost me a thousand dollars?

I wish somebody would make a study of the evolution of average shorthand system from inspiration to creation to development and adoption. But of course, that is vanishingly likely to happen. The conundrum that occurs when learning any system today seems to lie in the very engine under the hood. The thing that makes it tick is also why it is obsolete.

I realize that learning any system, while still worthwhile as a hobby or intellectual exercise, has its difficulty increased and its mastery deferred by the necessity of abbreviated forms. Most any shorthand system lingers in the realm of neography until unique abbreviations and special symbols come into play.

But the truth is that the choice of these words is directly tied to what the creators and publishers assumed would be the application of the shorthand system. Famously, Henry Sweet was criticized for ignoring the field of business correspondence and record keeping in creating what he deemed to be necessary shortcuts. This, among other things, naturally hindered the adoption of his Current system.

One take a glance at an old Gregg Or Pitman manual, even the final textbooks of Centennial Edition from the 1980’s, or the available Teeline manuals today, and one is faced with the language of the typing pool secretary, the accountant or shipping clerk, or the British legacy media journalist. In a twist of fate, it is Sweet’s linguistic emphasis that seems to me to be the most contemporary to us the language lovers of today. If only it weren’t dated in the myriad other ways something written over a hundred years ago is bound to be.

We need to have an up to date general abbreviation list that can be applied across systems. Perhaps the 200 words that every Shorthand System should emphasize above all else.