The Tools I Use

IN THESE TIMES, by which (for posterity's sake) I mean the mid-2020s, new questions are being asked of creative folks about how we make the things we make. The suspicion, or at least the worry, is often that generative so-called "Artificial Intelligence" is being used. I may someday write a screed about the many ways in which I loathe and despise this technology: its ruination of intellectual property rights, its negative impacts on human thought, creativity, and (most notably) the environment we all share, its pointless, speculation-driven disruption of both job and financial markets, its continued use as a smokescreen to frighten policymakers into doing stupid stuff (take it from a person with a linguistics degree: no amount of machine-derived language, nor any degree of syntactical sophistication in such output, will ever magically transform a computer program into anything resembling a conscious mind) and, simply, its essential crappiness, evident in the lack of generated content in your media libraries and mine. For now, suffice it to say I don't touch the tech, and haven't since early 2023, when a fellow traveler enthused about the technology to me and I came home to test out a few images in a DALL-E model. (I wasn't impressed back then, either.)

So, as you've read, I do have big opinions about LLMs and other such automated media extrusion programs, but I don't want to dig deeply into that right now. Instead, for anyone who's curious, I'd like to share the tools I actually use to make the creative things I make. And yes, this will overlap somewhat with the list of links to software I use on my Links page.

This Website

This site was built (and continues to be built) using the following tools:

• Neocities is obviously where Free Trash is hosted. They provide an easy interface and no ads. I send them $5 a month in exchange, but it's perfectly possible to host a site for free here, too. I like to pay them a little because I appreciate their ad-free, user-friendly platform.
• This site is built using HTML and CSS, both of which I have some experience with, but no natural talent. I rely heavily on the code examples and lessons found at W3 Schools, and if you inspect my code you will see that in some cases, I've simply copied a basic template from their site wholesale, and changed the details to fit what I want. Once I've picked up the basic form of some useful code, then I type it out manually in most cases (including the entire body of this page), but I still rely on W3 Schools for doing things I haven't yet learned how to do on my own.

Memes and Edited Images

Over the years, I've made several silly images. I don't have all of them available anymore--did I mention I'm in my 40s, and have been doing this since I was a teenager?--but a number are hosted on this very site, albeit not yet linked anywhere. I've made every such image in my life using one of the following tools:

• Microsoft Paint was the first image editor I used to overlay text on images, back in the early to mid 2000s (the "All your base are belong to us" / "I can haz cheezburger?" era of the social internet). I don't use it much anymore, but it still does a fine job of adding text to an image. I can't recommend the current Copilot-infected version of Paint, but I want to give it an honorable mention for being the first image editor I used for internet humor.
• Adobe Photoshop was my go-to editor for many years, starting around 2006 when I joined the editing team at a college literary (small) magazine. We had four shiny workstations outfitted with Adobe Creative Suite 2. Learning to manipulate layers and follow tutorials for gradient transparencies and other such tricks opened me up to a much wider world of image-editing possibilities. Later, around 2014, I picked up my first job in digital marketing, and regained access to Photoshop once more (up until just this summer). As time's passed, I've discovered that Photoshop is actually a bit more power than I actually need or want, but it's true that some of my smoothest edits were made using that program.
• Paint.NET is my current go-to for image editing, and has been for many years now. It's faster to load, and simpler to use, than Photoshop; though it lacks many of PS's advanced manipulation features, I don't really need most of those bells and whistles, since I'm not a visual artist in any meaningful way. Paint.NET supports layers, importing objects, and some basic effects. It's also free, which is a big bonus. I prefer it over Paint for anything more complex than cropping an image, and I prefer it over Photoshop because it's quicker, lighter, and easier to understand. Paint.NET can't make professional-looking image edits (unless you're already very skilled with such things, I suppose), but it does what I want it to without complaint.

My Novel (and other writing)

Talk about burying the lede, huh? Yes, I am currently writing a novel. I'm about 93,000 words in as of late August 2026 (I'd be over 100k by now, but I paused this week to polish and submit a short, 6,000-word sword & sorcery story for publication--fingers crossed!). It's a fantasy epic in the style of the 1970s/1980s high fantasy I grew up loving, but with less awkward sensibilities about who gets to be in the spotlight. (I'm a diehard fantasy lover, but even I get tired of stories where every protagonist is a secret prince, or turns out to be preternaturally good at everything she does, or has "a destiny that will be fulfilled," or is just too damn pretty and perfect.) My novel follows a wiry little goatherd with a bleak past, an uncultivated talent for magic, and a lot of anger in her heart, living in a dusty oasis town and wondering if there's anywhere she could just exist without being feared and despised. Obviously, dominos start to fall and she ends up saving the world--it is high fantasy, after all--but it's my hope that I'll end up with a nice mix of comfortable story beats and more human, deeply flawed characters than one would typically find in, say, a Raymond Feist or Shirley Rosseau Murphy book. Here are the tools I am using to write this story:

• The computer and its OS: I'm not one to overly romanticize the past: Typewriters are grossly inconvenient for editing purposes. In my experience, writing boils down to two parts, "generation" (writing lots of text) and "editing" (improving the text I've written). I don't pretend to have fully-formed, near-perfect books rattling around in my head; like a sculptor, I start with more material than I'll end up with. The magic is in knowing where and how to cut away the pieces that don't belong in the finished work. In light of this fact, it only makes sense that I'd prefer a computer over any other device for my writing. I am currently using a 2011 Lenovo laptop running Zorin OS, a version of Linux that's specially designed to run well on older PCs. Zorin is okay; the computer is still about as slow as it ever was, but everything seems to work, and it wasn't too complicated to get it set up the way I wanted. Zorin comes with an "airplane mode" toggle that blocks all data connections (internet, Bluetooth, etc.), and I leave it on all the time except when I email myself a backup copy of my work about every 30,000 words.
• The software: I write everything in LibreOffice Writer. It's a free word processor that's analogous to (and pretty compatible with) Microsoft Office, sans the ads, tracking, data collection, and invasive LLM widgets that come with a "premium" paid Microsoft product. I've never willingly used Office suite in my entire life; I find it slow, bloated, and frustrating to use. Almost any alternative is better, in my opinion; LibreOffice is one of the more mainstream competitors in the FOSS (free and open-source software) category, and it works great, even on an old machine like mine. The suite also comes with spreadsheet, database, and drawing applications, just like Office. I use LibreOffice's spreadsheet program, Calc, to track my daily word count progress.
• The space: We're lucky to have a small spare room in our house (which would have been for a child, had we been lucky enough to have one, but that's another story). A few years ago, I turned it into a sort of den, a place to keep all my old gaming consoles (and games), most of my books, board games, comic books, puzzles, Magic: The Gathering cards, and so on. I "built a shelf" (read: I bought two shelf brackets and an unfinished pine board from Lowe's, then asked my much-handier neighbor to cut a half-circle in one side of the board so I could run cables through it), mounted a $30 cast-off flatscreen TV from Goodwill to the wall above it (with a CRT below for my really old consoles), set that old Zorin laptop on the shelf, and connected it to the flatscreen. I use a wireless USB keyboard and mouse set, and I sit in a $40 secondhand bucket rocker (the chairs that look like smaller upholstered easy chairs, but which don't have footrests and rock back on a metal base). I write a minimum of 1,500 words every weekday morning in that chair, looking up at my text on a 44" HDTV screen and sipping coffee from an oversize novelty mug a friend gave me for my 40th birthday.