a stream

1. Updated the home page of this site today, adding prominent links to RSS feeds, a gallery of recent post images, and returning a link to the “Featured / Longer Things” post collection. Now I need to update the front matter of all the other missing posts that belong in that “featured” collection.

And with the images back I feel like I should start taking and posting more photographs of things other than just screenshots and shit I bought.

2. Also updated the Tree of Life, a.k.a. Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, a.k.a. Site Taxonomy page, improving styling and adding toggle buttons to make each element collapsible. This will be extremely useful to me, if to no one else, as my next job here is to clean up and standardize all the taxonomical front matter in old posts. This will be the authority.

(This is the first attempt at me posting status updates in the notes feed when I make changes to a static page. I got this idea from maya.land as a possible solution to the problem I described in “My Revisionist History” the week before last. I have another essay or whatever mostly drafted about my evolution and plans on future site organization, inspired in part by exploring Maya’s and other people’s web pages, but I don’t know when/if that will see the light of day. I do need to do more learning on digital gardens and whatnot.)

Standalone post link: Home and Taxonomy Updates (March 20, 2022)

I had in mind a new reading update rule for 2022 - I wasn’t going to post a reading update about any book (neither here nor on Goodreads) until I was at least 10-15% of the way into the book.

But I forgot my rule, and now the books I barely started and haven’t continued to read are hanging over my head, and I hate all you big invisible jerks for holding me silently accountable for every random thing I post here.

Just kidding. I do have a lot of false starts, and I do hate the weird pressure and embarrassment that comes from posting about a book and then not following through, even though people probably aren’t actually paying any attention.

Maybe I should set the line at 20 percent…

Ditto to posting about “favorite” music prematurely. I want to deliberately wait until I have truly listened to something 3-4 times, or purchased a physical copy, because I’m impressionable. I’m doing a bit better on the music front this year, though.

Standalone post link: The 15% rule for Reading Updates

Here are some of the things I’m working on and thinking about now…

• Concocting and rolling out changes to this website. +

  Laying the groundwork to put more content in ‘collections’ and static pages not bound by the reverse-chronological tyranny of the ‘feed’, all the while trying to make sure the date-based feeds are accessible and functional, because they do have their place.

• Proceeding on my work goal of getting back to creating and curating more resources, as well as being better about sharing and promoting the resources that already exist. +

  Started with this ‘Top titles of 2021’ project.

• Listening to Nilüfer Yanya’s album PAINLESS pretty obsessively, as well as the new Big Thief double-album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. +

  

  Obsessive repeat listens are actually good for my mindset, I think, and I hadn’t realized how long it had been since I was last hooked on an artist or album like this.

• I read Moon Witch Spider King and had big plans for more reading, but I’ve kind of fallen off. +

  See the next bullet for a reason why.

• Playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus +

  This was something I started supposedly just to humor my kids, but to be honest I think I’m playing it more than they are now and I’ve let it get in the way a bit of my reading (see above) and my writing and working on this website. But sometimes in the evening those other things seem too hard, and that pokédex isn’t going to fill itself…

• Our backyard is a a muddy hellscape that will dry to a dustbowl in summer, and I should be doing something about it, but I just can’t. +

  I don’t know where to start. Help me please.

This page was last updated on March 19, 2022. See my prior ‘now’ updates here.

Credit for the ‘now’ page concept goes to Derek Sivers. +

Standalone post link: Now (March 19, 2022)

I recently built and shared this ‘Top Titles of 2021’ thing at work.

I crunched data, built these interactive charts, and cranked out a series of posters and presentation graphics showing the most-circulated books in my district’s school libraries in the last calendar year.

This is the first remotely ‘creative’ product I can remember making at work in forever, unless you count bespoke MARC records for self-published Amazon titles, or XML files custom-mapped from inventory spreadsheets of thousands of Chromebook serial numbers for import into our resource management system. Oh, and of course, my never-ending quest to write The Great American Email. Actually, one of the Great American Emails was written to describe this very ‘Top Titles’ project, so now I’ve come full circle. Self actualization?

Standalone post link: A Thing I Made At Work - Granite Top Titles of 2021

‘Album Released’ notifications might be my very favorite phone notifications.

I woke up last Friday morning to see these notifications pop in that several anticipated albums had been released, and had thus automatically added themselves to my music library/streaming service of choice.

I was excited to get listening, but work turned out to be way too hectic for headphones that day, and so I only got partway through one album on my commute to and from work. And as it turns out I have basically just listened to that one album, PAINLESS, over and over again since then, intermixed with older tracks from the same artist, Nilüfer Yanya. I’m listening to it again right now.

Not sure what to say about this album, but I’ve added it to my Favorite Music of 2022 collection. Might have to get a physical copy. Might have to get tickets for her show in Salt Lake later this year, if I decide I am going to do things like go out to events again.

Standalone post link: Listening Repeatedly to PAINLESS by Nilüfer Yanya

Turns out I can’t resist the re-read.

I am going to finish Little Devil in America first, though. And read other things in-between. A slow re-read, because I already pretty much know what happens?

Standalone post link: blackleopardredwolfagain

I often find myself tinkering with already-published notes on this site. I initially thought of this as a confession, because at times I’ve felt that editing old posts (beyond fixing minor typos or bugs) is somehow cheating. But, no, revision is not cheating. There is no rule of any sort that I cannot change, improve, or remove old posts as I see fit. It turns out that this is my own website and I make the rules around here. I had forgotten I get to do whatever I want with my website, though that was kind of the point in not interacting with some corporation’s platform anymore.

Now, having jettisoned my guilt and cast aside my faith in conventional weblog practice, I am contemplating yet more aggressive revisionist practices. These measures shall serve to further consolidate my narrative and solidify my power and absolute domination over this web domain.

<mwahaahaha>
    Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.  
</mwahaahaha>
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¹

One of my failures on this site, and really any site or platform on which I have ever shared content, is that I don’t always get around to posting things right when they are relevant.² I still want to share my thoughts and have a record of them, but too often, posting such things later becomes incompatible with the idea of the chronological or current “feed” — the conventional organizational concept of a weblog or a social media account. And so, overwhelmed with ideas left unfinished and unshared, and feeling unable to move forward, I go quiet again.

Long story short, I might start adding new-but-back-dated updates and posts — not just republishing old content from my defunct websites and social media accounts, but also interleaving previously unpublished notes and photographs recorded in previous times but never shared.

My goal is to have a single life journal or archive of sorts that pulls from all my different sources. I do need to do more learning in “digital gardens” and related concepts, but in the meantime I feel a need to get moving and publishing. This is something I just really want for myself - I don’t entirely know if it should be public, actually? Yes, it needs to be public, because even if not tied to any other platforms or networks I do have some sort of amorphous internet audience in mind for these things I share here, for better or worse. I want to be able to share this site with people I know on occasion, asynchronously. I want to link to it. I want items on my site to become serendipitous search results. I might want to make it into a newsletter. I want it to be my interface with the world.

The Internet has changed a lot and is rumored to have been ruined by corporations, but my past experience tells me that good things can come from a little old personal website. My old blog in the late 2000s was once found as a serendipitous search result by a certain person. That person and I have since collaborated in creating two entirely new humans together, and we are coming up on our fourteenth marriage anniversary next month. I wasn’t really looking for love through my website, but I put some of myself out there into the world and it happened. I think it still exists, the promise and possibility of connecting with other people and spreading ideas through a genuine personal website, rather than playing a toxic algorithm. I hope so, for my kids and other young people.

To make my revisionism more transparent I’ve added “Last Updated” fields to the bottom of each post. I’m trying to decide if I should take the time to also build a “Recently Updated” page/feed that lists the sometimes-backdated notes and posts based on when they were last updated, rather than their original post date. (I admit, I tried one way to build such a page today and failed miserably.)

As always, if you have thoughts to share you can email me by clicking “Contact me” in the footer of every page.

Standalone post link: My Revisionist History

I finished reading Moon Witch Spider King yesterday evening.

There is a strong pull to re-read Black Leopard Red Wolf, but I have so many other books to read that I’m reluctant to give over another potential month or so of reading for this series right now.

But I don’t know if I can let this world go quite yet, and it’s going to be another couple of years, probably…

Standalone post link: Finished Moon Witch Spider King

☑ I have obtained a copy of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, the latest album by Big Thief.

☑ My copy of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You features two 180 gram recycled vinyl LPs, one marbled red-orange and the other marbled turquoise-grey, housed in a heavy gatefold sleeve with an accompanying lyric booklet. The sound of this vinyl is amazing and is one of the best and only vinyl sets I have picked up in a while.

☑ I have played three-and-a-half of the four sides of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You on my living room stereo, in the presence of my children and our dog. (It was bedtime before we’d quite finished, and unfortunately, due to deteriorating behavioral fidelity, the sounds of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You needed to be terminated prematurely before the final tracks played.)

☑ Prior to this inaugural listening of the Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You vinyl in my house, I did force a premature mid-episode termination of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, all the while recognizing that the phrase “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You” sounds more than anything like it could have been lifted from dialogue or song in an episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

☑ I have created a ‘Collections’ section on this website, and In that section I have created a ‘My Favorite Music of 2022’ collection page, and on that page I have added Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You as the first album in that collection.

☑ I have declared (here, right now) that Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is my frontrunner and album to beat for the prestigious honor of being my ‘AOTY’ (album of the year) in 2022.

☑ I have now included the title and phrase Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You at least eight times in this post, and, in addition, have included the title and phrase My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic at least three times.

Standalone post link: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You - Achievement Unlocked!

Maybe a little too excited that I managed to create a hugo shortcode to do this hide/show toggle function in any post now:

Maybe I should generalize it and share the actual template code here and on GitHub? Never actually done that sort of thing, and yet I’m constantly stealing from others who have…

Standalone post link: Hide Show Excitement