Although I consider myself a writer, there nevertheless always exists some form of hypercorrection and crazy perfectionism whenever I wish to write something on The Staccato Slur. Perhaps, this is from my slight fear of how I am interpreted ultimately as a thinker. As said, The Staccato Slur is mostly personal – of what deep thought or mundane act is not shared in real life amongst close friends, will eventually find itself here in the online world, aside from the occassional post about the occassional something else. It all has to do with some sort of putting on a good impression, maybe?

What’s hypercorrection anyway, you may ask? Although there’s like a whole linguists’ literature on it as a linguistic technical phenomena, I would just think of it as an excessive correction of grammar and style in language – in my case, I would not think that the effort I place in it is more than your typical grammar Nazi, but then the paranoia about it is about ten times higher. Rather than to correct the wrong phrasing, the tendency here is to use a very prescriptive guide to language that can be a little unnatural and counter-intuitive. Eventually, I could actually wrong the correct phrasing. Think of awkward “you and I” moments in writing when it would be more nicer to read as “you and me”; but you are using the former because somehow you have picked it up in the past perceiving it to be more “correct”. Hence, my point; and I parse every sentence I write about ten times in a state of hypercorrectiveness before I go onto the next.

The previous post on Strepsils? Haha, I was writing it in a hurry – the style’s slightly different from other posts. Meh, this perfectionism makes my writing of some posts really slow. Admittedly, even after checking, my inherent standard of English’s not fantastic enough to claim perfection still. What a bother.

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I was planning to write a series of posts about advanced topics in existentialist philosophy a while ago. I don’t claim expertise, but hopefully some proficiency enough to be able to argue a coherent position. However, I remembered then that I made a promise, unvetted, regarding the need for a conscious attempt to simplify and introduce any technical topics I may write about to the readers. Modifying my plan a little then, I have decided to instead integrate those posts into part of a greater series which, instead of starting with advanced discussions in philosophy, aims to be a sort of “course in existentialism” where I will try my best to teach existentialism from scratch in Post No. 1 and gradually build upon it in later posts so that the unintiated could actually eventually become proficient in the thought processes of existentialists. This is a big project, of course, and a scary one for me – existentialism can be misinterpreted to become a philosophy of assholes, and I am not qualified academically to say that my understanding is sound. But I do really want to try since it could actually be personal while mostly objective for the uninitiated – in the course, I may find myself managing to perfect and synthesize some of my more raw thoughts about the subject as “teaching material for advanced topics”.

The writing will be slow though. As said, Virgo hypercorrection forbids me from being too haphazard with style; though I assure you my overall subjective expression will be worthy of art. I will try to minimize on unfamiliar words in my writing – by that I mean English words rather than technical terms of philosophy. However, since many times a single difficult word can do the work of a many simple phrases, I apologize if you the reader may find comprehension a hard task. It is necessary though, since I wish to spend more time elaborating on the technical philosophical concepts, that effectively leads to demystifying existentialist philosophy, than using the time otherwise explaining a couple of unfamiliar English words. The complication is when I do not quite share your distinction between what is to be technical and what is to be English; for me it is quite blurred when I unconsciously may use jargon, that has become familiar, in everyday life too.

I will welcome comments and criticism on the series, and complaints about unclear or vague language when the former begins – this post itself of “Hypercorrection” be an acknowledgement of my sometimes hypercorrected language used. Talk about using jargon.

I got a video from the WordPress blog here about WordPress 2.7; well, you can see how the admin panel looks like here. I have no wish to congest the Internet further with screenshots of my own panel – they all look about the same anyway.

Quite obviously, I think that 2.7 is but a first step to greater things to come. The new interface will take time getting used to, but hey, they have already simplified plenty of things for me. The inclusion of an in-built plugin installer; comment threading and sticky post system will be good news for other WordPress users and I, now that we can do away with third-party plugins for such purposes. The most exciting thing is the clear “modular” structure everything now is arranged. That seems to be the trend with Internet applications nowadays e.g. the dashboard has draggable elements; everything is, or looks AJAXed to open and close intuitively etc. I like it. I find everything integrated, tight, uncluttered.

I think that should be it? All about the candy; I don’t have much to bitch about then. I like the candy and only the candy’s changed. I can’t think of what else WordPress lacks that I cannot extend myself… Ah, the power of open-source.