StenEd: Y U No Be Conflict-Free?

     I've hit a major roadblock in my speedbuilding, and it's really starting to become aggravating. I haven't made any progress in a whole year. I'm supposed to have been "graduated" by now! Ugh. All I can do is keep plugging away at it, I guess. I don't know what the big problem is with this 2-minute section, though. It's really starting to lose all meaning at this point.
     I did finally accomplish something, though: I made it through the list of conflict-finding sentences! At first I was just going through it and if the sentence didn't produce a conflict, I moved on. But sometimes that was just because of a particular brief I had. So I took a closer look at what the sentence was trying to show me (that you shouldn't have the same outline for PER-, -PER and PER, for example) and made sure I wouldn't have any conflicts in any situation, not just the one presented by the sentence.
     I discovered a lot of flaws in my own personal theory, and in StenEd, the above example being one of them. At the end of the exercise, I had a problem with: -con, -ran, -less, -fin, -den, -mine, -lean, -net, -lent, -rise, -set, -let, -size, -sit, -stance, -ate, -wait, -pal, -lay, -nut, -plain, -lies, -man, -jer, -win, est-, -til, -mit, Ron-, and -ster. A lot of them are easy fixes, like adding an asterisk to the word part and leaving the actual words as they are, and I didn't have to change a huge amount of entries. However, there were some word parts that took more work. They were, with number of entries I had to fix: -tic/tic/tick (200), -cal/cal/-cal (345), ter/-ter (277), -rate (113), -ton (115), and -ship (92).
     Tick/tic/-tic was particularly problematic. TIK for tick, obviously, and T*IK for tic, but I couldn't do T-K for -tic because that's my "it can." So I went with T*K. The real problem is going to be remembering my resolutions for all of this stuff. Why couldn't StenEd have just actually been a conflict-free realtime theory, instead of being one "most of the time"?
     With all the stuff I had to fix, I was beginning to think I should've just left the asterisks in all of my ending word parts, because now I have to try to remember which ones have asterisks and which ones don't. I tried to delete the vowels or do something other than just add an asterisk to make it easier to remember.  Hopefully the number of ones I wound up just doing asterisks for is going to be small enough that I can learn them without inducing massive amounts of hesitation.
     I also spent about half an hour going through all of my capitalized entries and forcing literal case on names like "De Niro." I already had most of them done, but I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed any and it would all be consistent.

No comments:

Post a Comment