Update - November 13

9741 words have been written for NaNoWriMo! It is pretty clear at this point I shall not be making the 50,000 word count. Last year I also failed to make the count. However, I think a personal goal of 15,000 is quite doable. I have written around 14 drafts of articles for Ace Linguist. That's a lot of pages!

Behind the scenes, I've been working on an app to help me manage the social media for this site. I like using Twitter to communicate with you all, but the truth is that when it comes to updating, I am pretty forgetful. Sometimes I've had to write the tweet for a new post days after the post comes out. Or just not written it at all, even. This is not great if you are counting on social media to give you updates for new Ace Linguist posts. This weekend I demoed an app that would automatically fetch blog posts from Ace Linguist and turn them into Twitter tweets. If you saw some strange tweets from me this weekend, my apologies - I was trying out the service. I am happy to say that the tweeting portion is complete. I am not going to debut the app yet because I would like to incorporate Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. Once it's done, I will put it on Github for you all to gawk at and hopefully other Blogger-users can get some utility out of it as well.

Hello, world! This is a test - please ignore.

— Ace Linguist (@acelinguist) November 11, 2018

Retrospective

No new posts since I'm working on NaNoWriMo. I was going to begin uploading the files for a new Dialect Dissection but alas, Windows had other plans. I was on the edge of my seat because this is the update where some users reported losing their data.

Time to #hustle and #work on a new post! #DialectDissection here we come! LET'S GET👏THIS👏BRE- pic.twitter.com/0v7fSzY8xw

— Ace Linguist (@acelinguist) November 13, 2018

If you live in a country with a gift-giving holiday season, now is a great time to start looking for gifts for friends! If any of your friends like books and have an interest in language, try finding a book from this list by Gretchen McCulloch at All Things Linguistic.

Finally, perhaps the coolest thing I've seen... MRIs of beatboxers making sounds not present in any known language.

Real-time MRI data shows how beatboxers create sounds that don't exist in any known languages (with bonus video):https://t.co/2jrq3sAQKr

— Lee Murray (@MurrayLeeA) November 11, 2018

What's Cooking?

I've been saying this for a month now but there is a new Dialect Dissection coming soon to a computer near you! Between NaNoWriMo, the automation software, and Windows updates, I haven't been able to work on it as much as I would have liked. I am gunning to have it out either late November or early December.

- Karen