a stream

I published a review of Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga on Granite Media and also posted it on Goodreads.

I really wanted to put screenshots of this entire poem in the review, but couldn’t justify it on Granite Media. But here, I get to do whatever I want, so…

I still smile at everyone in the street. Not everyone smiles back, though. When they don’t, I want to say, ‘You don’t have to worry about me. I am just a girl who likes movies.’ -–Jude, in Jasmine Warga’s Other Words for Home

This is the engaging story of Jude, a girl who lives in a ocean-side town in Syria, where her father runs a convenience store for the tourists who visit the nearby beach resorts. She loves to watch old (1990s) American movies and sing along to Whitney Houston songs, and wants to be an actress. As tensions rise between the Syrian government and young demonstrators pushing for democracy, including Jude’s teenage brother Issa, Jude and her mother travel to visit Jude’s uncle in America. As the situation in Syria continues to deteriorate they are effectively refugees in America, and Jude must navigate American middle school while not knowing what is happening to her brother back home.

Jude is a character that all readers will be able to identify with, and Warga does a great service in showing Jude’s personality and the details of her family and life in Syria before the political unrest and violence breaks out. Crafted in easy-flowing free verse, this is a story that will help refugees, immigrants, English language learners, and really any young person who feels like they don’t quite fit in to feel seen, and it will build understanding and empathy in readers as it puts an individual face and experience on a terrible individual situation that can be hard to imagine or understand. This would make an excellent classroom read, and I highly recommend it for all young readers and for inclusion in every elementary and middle school library.

Reviewed by Joshua Whiting, Library Media Program, Educational Technology Department Rating: ★★★★★ (5 stars) Interest Level: Grades 4-8

Other Words for Home Written by Jasmine Warga Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 342 pages Release Date: May 28, 2019 ISBN: 9780062747808

Tags: 2019 Children’s Fiction, Cincinnati Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Emigration Fiction, Family Fiction, Government Resistance Fiction, Immigrants Fiction, Jasmine Warga, Joshua Whiting, Movies Fiction, Moving Fiction, Muslim Americans Fiction, Muslims Fiction, Novels in Verse, Ohio Fiction, Political Unrest Fiction, Realistic Fiction, Refugees Fiction, Syria Fiction, Syrian Americans Fiction

Standalone post link: Book Review - Other Words for Home

Gather ye rosehips while ye may?

Standalone post link: Luna Waiting for Will to Finish Gathering Rosehips

I made this super-inspiring video and just had to put it somewhere in the archives, and this is that somewhere.

The funny thing was that one day a whole bunch of balloons actually did float up outside my cubicle window in exactly this way. I didn’t get a video of them when it was real, so this was an animated re-creation of that moment.

The real balloons had what appeared to be postcards tied to them, so I believe that some students from the elementary school adjoining my building must have been doing that thing where you tie a pre-stamped postcard to a balloon and let it off to see if you ever get the postcard back from someone but instead you just cause a duck to choke to death or something.

(This was just for a work blog post to illustrate how simple it is to edit video in Windows 10 and add silly effects and animations.)

Did you know that there is an easy-to-use video editor already installed and available on all PCs with the Windows 10 operating system? Learn more about it in our latest #gsdedtech blog post: https://t.co/qmQl2inD9n

(It even has magical 3D animation effects.) pic.twitter.com/tC89lI6uhT

— Granite Educational Technology (@GraniteEdTech) November 25, 2019

Standalone post link: Balloons Outside My Cubicle Window

Standalone post link: Luna and the Moon

When you go for an annual physical for the first time in several years and your doctor informs you that you are outrageously overweight, but you’d already planned to go to Popeyes for lunch because you were going to be on that side of town, so you have to follow through.

I posted this on Instagram and then deleted it 6 minutes later while stuck in traffic driving away from Popeyes. I wish I had archived it instead, as I kind of want to bring it back but I don’t want it to have a later timestamp. Oh well.

Standalone post link: Following Through

I’m retconning my website. I might as well be transparent about it. I feel like my lack of consistently sharing anything out from this site to the wider Internet*, along with the fact that it is my little corner of the Internet and I can do whatever I want with it (and that’s kind of the whole point) gives me the freedom to add, change, shuffle, and randomly publish new posts as though they were several months backdated, as well resurrect content from my old zombie websites, &c.

This site, https://jdwhiting.com, shall become the center of a new and expanded JdwhitingDotCom/Froz-T-Freez Drive-In Internetical** Multiverse. Will this center be a singularity? A black hole? I don’t know yet, it remains to be seen. It’s a bizarre exercise done in darkness, but nevertheless it is going to be an ongoing aspect of this project since I plan to use this site as my personal all-inclusive internet archive.

STAR-except that one time I discovered that some old IFTTT recipe I had set up and forgotten about had suddenly started working properly and shared out some of my new website posts to Twitter without me realizing it and before I was ready to share. Maybe I should retcon my Twitter account, too.

STAR-STAR-I needed a word that means “of or relating to the Internet” and I came up with “internetical.”" I’m not convinced it is the best option, but I am convinced we need such an adjective for the Internet. Now I’m thinking about Magic and Loss, Virginia Heffernan’s brilliant book about the Internet as art, and I’m pretty sure that I wrote a review of it somewhere one time that I need to port onto this site so that I can link to it. It is for reasons such as this that I’m attempting this work. She likely has a perfect word for “of or relating to the internet” within that book and I’ve just forgotten it.

STAR-STAR-STAR-I haven’t taken the time to figure out how to do footnotes in markdown yet.

Standalone post link: The New Taxonomy of the JdwhitingDotCom/Froz-T-Freez Internetical Multiverse Drive-In

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

• I’m reading and reviewing children’s fiction to help determine the 2021 nominees for the Beehive Book Awards. I could always use more readers, so if you are interested and especially if you know kids who would be interested, let me know and I’ll hook you up with the list and some great books to read.

• Newly obsessed with and recommitted to getting my district’s library catalog in better shape after attending a Cataloging workshop courtesy of the Utah State Library and the main cataloging librarian for the Salt Lake County Library system a couple of weeks ago. I’m even, like, regularly referencing and importing authority records and other next-level MARC record stuff like that now. Hope it is helpful.

• Writing this in the “Canyon” lobby of the Natural History Museum of Utah while my son is at his friend’s birthday party somewhere in the museum. (It might be my favorite building in Utah so I couldn’t resist mentioning it.)

• I started a variation on Bullet Journaling in October and so far it is going quite well, better than any other journaling, notebooking, or task management system I’ve attempted up to this point in my life. (I drafted these notes in said journal at said natural history museum lobby before posting them on this site.)

• It wasn’t really my idea but we got a puppy in August. Her name is Luna. She has awesome foxlike ears with multiple points of articulation that could probably make useful contributions to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence if only she could better communicate with us what she is hearing. Sometimes she’ll go on walks/hikes with me or watch horror movies with me, but mostly she just chews on whatever stuff is around, including my children.

• Continuing to work on making this website functional and useful to myself. I toyed around with doing P.O.S.S.E. with this site as my basis, but I found out I actually don’t like the reality of how it works, so I am moving towards not having this site be my source for everything but rather using it as a central curation and archival location for everything I do anywhere on the internet that I feel like is worth noting or saving.

This page was last updated on November 9, 2019. See my prior ‘now’ updates here.

Credit for the ‘now’ page concept goes to Derek Sivers. I had envisioned a page of this sort for my new website, but my concept was vague and I didn’t have a clear way forward until I happened upon someone with a ‘now’ page and followed the trail back to the source. I think you should make one too.

Standalone post link: Now (November 9, 2019)

So years ago I remember coming across a thing called Digital Writing Month from some educator-writer type people I followed on twitter, and when seeing the usual pre-November hype for NaNoWriMo (which I always like the idea of but don’t actually want to do) I suddenly remembered it and thought I might try it this year, because it kind of fits with the project of this site.

But I guess it’s not really a thing anymore.

There’s a hashtag, but it’s kind of a ghost town. There’s this nice blog post from 2015. A lot of those people are out there still doing their thing, but in other frameworks with other names. I don’t know whether or how I would fit in to any of it. So, despite having zero community with which to do this, I might still kind of try it. By “it” I basically mean “create something random on the Internet every day for a month” and share it on this site. We’ll see. My NaPoWriMo attempt in April only lasted for like 4 days.

P.S. I am pretty good at covertly doing random, pointless things. This website is a great example. Another is that I wore a Halloween costume yesterday that was so low-key that no-one recognized it as anything unusual, and I didn’t tell anyone about it. I dressed as Lionel Richie from the cover of his 1982 self-titled album.

Standalone post link: DigiWriMo?

It is currently 4 AM and I am awake for some reason, and I just heard a noise downstairs of unclear origin.

Maybe I shouldn’t have watched this with my 4 month old puppy around. Was that a mistake? Will she live deliciously now? Will she grow up and randomly kill us all one morning like that damn goat?

She started paying attention at points where there were kids on the screen. She got noticeably agitated at a couple of moments when characters were yelling at each other or screaming. I don’t think she paid attention to the blood. I hope she didn’t pay attention to the blood. I turned the movie off and made her go outside while I finished watching this. Then I felt bad so we played fetch in the darkness for like 30 minutes.

It’s been over three months since I last watched a movie, and because this dog’s crate is in the same room as our television, it may be another three months before I watch another one.

Standalone post link: THE VVITCH


If I had a ‘Favorite Albums of 2019’ list I’d be adding Big Thief’s new album Two Hands to that list.

I can’t think of a band that seems more devoted to the work right now than Big Thief. This is their second release this year, and it seems they’ve been touring and recording almost nonstop for several years now.

*Of course I have a ‘Favorite Albums of 2019’ list. It is sitting partway created in a post draft, and it will be absolutely epic, just like every other unfinished thing in my life. The intended epic-ness is of course a big part of why these things never get finished. I’m over that now, though; I’m just sharing stuff in quasi-realtime now.

Standalone post link: Two Hands