This reminds me of a gag recording I did for missed calls on an early cell phone. Back in those days it wasn't uncommon to get a recorded error message along the lines of "Wireless Provider error 123: explanation of reason you're getting this error". I recorded a message in my best imitation of the error voice that said "Wireless Provider error 427: The wireless customer you're attempting to contact has passed away. Leave a message and we'll be sure to pass it on to their next-of-kin". This message lasted until the first time I missed a call from my mother, who was understandable very upset!
Had a related thing, back when landlines were expensive. A roommate went off on Peace Corps to Sierra Leone for a year, and I inherited her landline.
A telemarketer called asking for her, and I said "oh, she'll be in Africa for a year." The marketer had a minor meltdown. Evidently, he had been close to the end of his rope already, and this (honest) answer pushed him that much closer. "Don't mock me. Just hang up or say she's not taking calls," he begged me.
This is when I finally realized I didn't need to be honest with telemarketers. Subsequently, whenever I'd get a call asking for her, I'd try to come up with more and more exotic reasons she couldn't answer the phone. Since her name was not pronounced the way the spelling suggested it might be, it was easy to know whether the caller knew her or not, and I could respond accordingly.
We were riding go karts as part of a friend's bachelor party. I had a hard time fitting in the kart and mine was noticeably slower than the rest. My nerves were on edge and my heart was palpitating the whole time we were driving. I had always been overweight, but up until then I was able to tell myself that it had never kept me from doing anything I wanted to do. That was the kick in the pants I needed to see how my inattention to my health was limiting me and directly lead to losing over 150 pounds.
Congrats. To me, it's one of those weird things that sneaks up on you. Or maybe it doesn't and you just don't care. Then one day you realize 'damn, what happened.'
What's interesting to me is how much better you feel once losing weight. Half of what I assumed were 'just getting older' problems vanished, energy way up, etc. Wish there were VR or a pill or something so that everyone could know/remember what it's like, as motivation.
But in any event, kudos to you - changing the lifestyle and sticking to it isn't easy.
I think backspace should count as a keystroke within the same sentence for the purpose of delaying deletion.
It would be really cool for this to dump your content into a rich text editor when your time is up for spell check, cleaning, and editing before download.
So I wanted backspace too, but thinking about it, even within the same sentence it would damage the purpose of freewriting which is to stop editing and get words flowing out of your head and into somewhere you can be objective about it later. On a five minute run (my initial one) I found myself running up against the red words a few times as I self-edited what I wanted to say, and it helped me stop that and move forward again. I'm pretty sure I didn't break the sentence barrier those times either, but then, as you can tell, especially from this pernicious example, I'm prone to more lengthy run-on sentences — overloaded and dripping with information in a languid fashion.
