Video of Plover-assisted Art Installation: Assembly

Wow, remember when I blogged about Assembly, an art project featuring MIDI steno at the 2019 Venice Biennale? Our amazing Italian stenographer friend Sillabix posted actual footage of it in the Plover Discord recently! He says:

I had to study the more palatable chords to steno the poem "In another tongue" of the Australian poet David Malouf. Then they took the Midi datas outputted from the Michela and created a musical score for several instruments. Was a bit difficult because steno chords sound really close to dodecaphonic music. The coolest thing was the great versatility of Plover: without it this project wouldn't have been possible. Eclipse translation was too slow and out of sync with the midi notes recorded by the notation software. Several aspects involved and several twists to let steno and music meet together so that the notes played by all the instruments and the chorists could be an arrangement from the original steno chords.

So freaking cool!!

Read Punz's Steno Diary!

From the Discord, there's a new Steno Diary to enjoy, by new Plover learner Punz. I love this genre of journal. It's always really fun to witness the trajectory of progress, the frustrations, the pushing past the plateaus... Can't wait to read more!

He Completed Typey Type!

Check out this fantastic blog post by someone who got 100% progress on Typey Type! It's a great read, and made me so dang happy.

And so, after five months of practice, I finally reached 100% completion, meaning I have been able to type 10,000 words without mis-strokes. I was initially worried that I was not hitting goals fast enough since I read of people who were, say, getting up to 50 words-per-minute (WPM) after just a month or two of steno practice. Maybe they had the luxury to dedicate their entire full-time schedule to stenography, or maybe they were super-geniuses, or maybe a bit of both…. Regardless, I needed to consciously ignore all this, not compare myself to anyone else (real or imagined), and just keep up the routine. It may have taken a while, but I do not mind; the journey has been beneficial and being able to hit a goal feels great!

New Typey-Type Lessons: Proverbial Phrases!

Check out these fantastic exercises on Typey-Type using commonly known proverbs to drill your steno skills!

Unrelatedly, in the shower today I thought of the sentence "PAUL STRAPD TRUFLD WAFLS TO TWO TRUBLD RED RATS", which is not what you'd call a common proverb yet, but just give it time. I might use it in a future talk on steno for beginners, anyway. It made me giggle.