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

• Finishing up a winter holiday break and starting the new year with this ‘now’ update. Spent a lot of nice, casual time with my family, and successfully avoided doing any work off the clock, other than glancing at my email occasionally and making a few notes and plans (see below.)

• I’m trying my hand at digital gardening and note-making in earnest, using Obsidian as my primary tool. My new digital garden is private, but I may publish elements of it here once I get things more established.

• Winter break work plan, which I hope I can hold to once actually back at work: also adopt a digital gardening approach at work, with a view to develop a new knowledgebase for library and technology staff, create and curate more learning resources, etc. Our websites and instructions are showing their years.

• Developing new workflows and methods for MARC record acquisition/creation/editing and other obscure but necessary library and technology inventory tasks so as to be able to focus more energy on digital collection development and the resource creation mentioned above.

• Trying to predict the Newbery by focusing a lot of my reading on middle grade books, especially some of the likely contenders. Goal is to predict the Newbery or at least to have a good chance of already having read the winner before it wins. Underlying, better goal is simply to find/read/recommend good books for kids.

• Getting beyond overthinking and overreading about films and finally just going to see a bunch of movies. I’ve joined a flexible 2023 watch challenge on Letterboxd, and then I’ve created two other watch challenges for myself: the Silent Films x Public Domain Challenge 2023 and Spielberg 2023.

This page was last updated on January 3, 2023. See my prior ‘now’ updates here.

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

Standalone post link: Now (January 2, 2023)

It has only been two days since I started posting on my site again and also syndicating the posts to various places, and I’m finally ready to admit:

1. it is in fact a huge pain in the ass to use Hugo as a microblog (at least the way I have mine set up)

2. my syndications to twitter and tumblr don’t quite work like I hoped they would, and I’m not sure what the point of them is, even if I could get them working better

3. I started obsessively looking at my old twitter account feed yesterday after being off it for a couple of years, and I think I still don’t want to re-engage with that at this point in time

My micro.blog syndication works okay, but I’m not following anyone there offficially and probably not posting stuff that will get featured in their “discover” feed. Still flirting with the idea of going all-in on micro.blog, though, because it would be easy and because whenever I look at the discover feed I learn stuff and am inspired by the people who share there. Have followed a bunch of people I’ve found there via RSS or newsletter subscriptions.

I admit I also still learned stuff from scrolling my old twitter feed yesterday, but I also saw a whole lot of garbage and got nearly sucked into several dramas and controversies that don’t actually concern or interest me. It took too much time and drained too much energy sifting for gold on twitter. I need to go through all my good twitter follows and find their blogs or what not, move the ones I like into RSS where I can avoid some of the junk.

Standalone post link: RE: Scattering

Finished reading Kwame Alexander’s The Door of No Return last night, and then started on Christina Soontornvat’s The Last Mapmaker. (I’m only at ~8% on Mapmaker so I’m breaking my self-imposed “only post an update if you are at least 20% of the way through the book” rule.)

Standalone post link: ''readingthedoorofnoreturn''

Finished reading Windswept by Margi Preus last night, and then started in on The Door of No Return by Kwame Alexander [~35%].

Getting into an active reading mode with books of my own choosing. It has been awhile.

Standalone post link: Reading Update - November 26, 2022

It feels like the last days of social media, looting, anarchy, the scattering of peoples and the confounding of languages, so I feel like I can post again with abandon now. Posts no longer feeling chiseled in stone, but wandering snowflakes that might melt away at any moment. Or maybe just blobs of semi-melted snow.

Also, my newish co-worker is motivated about sharing positive school library things and encouraged us to start posting stuff on our work social media accounts again, which helped me realize that posting things is not that big of a deal, and that I had built it up into a weirdly huge deal both professionally and personally.

So, I’m posting on my website again, and I’m setting up goofy RSS-triggered processes to syndicate those posts to micro.blog, tumblr, and ye olde twitter. These are the places I want to play around with for now, and this is the first test to see what happens with my syndication.

BOOM.

Standalone post link: scattering

Prescient analysis on the events of the coming day from the New York Times.

It’s not unusual to overeat on Thanksgiving, but you may end up feeling bloated, gassy and uncomfortable afterward. – The New York Times - November 24, 2022

Standalone post link: bloated, gassy and uncomfortable

Link: Tourism is sucking Utah dry. Now it faces a choice - growth or survival? | Gabrielle Canon, with photographs by Kim Raff

Type: News Article

Source: The Guardian

“It is getting loved to death,” [Martha Ham] said, noting the need to help tourists and locals connect more deeply to the waterways and landscapes. Time for change is running short. Without a shift, the desert ecosystems will be imperiled along with the industries and communities that have come to rely on them. “Regardless of where you live in the world, it is crucial to be in touch with the natural limits of your environment,” she said. “People who think of visiting Utah, I hope when they come they see more evidence of us being in touch with our natural limits.”

“Utah is right in the bullseye of the US’s climate change impacts,” said Jon Meyer, assistant state climatologist at the Utah Climate Center, noting the “buffet of climate impacts” across the state. From declining amounts of snow in the winter and summer heatwaves to drought and destructive deluges – the conditions have been “an inflection point that has driven home the idea that Utah, its citizens and its economy are very impacted by the idea of a changing climate”, he said. “People are finding themselves in riskier situations for more days of the year.”

“We are so disconnected from the land or the water that we don’t even think about it,” [Ed] Andrechak says, adding that the answer doesn’t lie in new inventions or dramatic new water supply diversions, but in becoming more water-wise. “We can save ourselves by ourselves. I believe that analytically as an engineer and I believe it spiritually as a resident.”

This isn’t really about the Great Salt Lake but I’m getting nervous about The Great Salt Lake.

I’ve taken it for granted that people in Utah will never do anything about water usage for religious/cultural reasons, because abundance of water in the desert is seen as a fulfillment of prophecy and a spiritual birthright. (I have a whole sardonic note about that, which maybe I should finish and post sometime.)

I used to just take this is as “whatever,” just one more thing I don’t agree with many of my fellow Utahns about, but now I’m realizing we might really destroy everything for ourselves, and I’m not sure I can be just “whatever” about it. (I’m confident the land will continue fine without us, eventually. Nature overall can adapt; I see climate change as entirely a problem by humans, for humans. A bunch of other species might lose as well, but nature will be fine.)

Standalone post link: Link - Tourism Is Sucking Utah Dry...Growth or Survival?

Link: Filterworld: Algorithm Cleanse | Kyle Chayka

Type: Essay / Newsletter

Source: Kyle Chayka Industries (via Substack)

“It has taken a while for my brain to get used to that novel sense of finitude, though I think the withdrawal is subsiding. Plenty of products offer a more curated, less overwhelming version of the internet, but I think we’ve actually become conditioned to its chaos and grown to expect it. It’ll take more effort to re-train ourselves to finding things without the help of algorithmic feeds and then being satisfied with what we find. We have to quieten that internal internet-pilled voice that says more, more, more, new, new, new every minute.”

This resonates with my experience after leaving social media wholesale about 9 months ago.

Differences:

• He has only been off of algorithms for a week and a half so far.
• He is a journalist/writer/“content creator”-type person by profession, so the stakes are higher for him. Stakes were pretty low for me -
  • professionally because I have so many other things to do at work besides mess with social media and my boss doesn’t seem to care, its not a priority; and
  • personally I don’t really have any friends, because I’m asocial or misanthropic or a sociopath or something. (No, probably not a sociopath - they usually cultivate a bunch of fake friends and followers so that they can manipulate them.)
• I got addicted to the Apple News app for a while after I gave up Facebook, Insta etc., and it was almost as much of a problem for me as the others had been. I’ve come to recognize my relationship to email to be a problem, too. I wasn’t recognizing or pinpointing a true source of the problem at first: that constant desire for random new inputs to fill and distract.

“Writers contribute to the feeds as much as we consume them, propelling the endless loop of vacuity. Posting is an addiction, too, and while I certainly suffer from it, I think all that energy is now expressed in my more serious writing, which is probably a good thing. Without the daily outlet of tweeting my random thoughts and getting instantaneous feedback — lols, likes, DMs — I’m also feeling grateful for this newsletter, where I can publish something and know it’ll get to an audience that welcomes what I’m doing.”"

• I’ve intermittently posted random bits of what I might once have posted on social media platforms (such as this very note) here on this little website. I’m not sure that anyone other than my son ever occasionally looks at this, so it might be sort of the equivalent of his fidget apps but for the posting/sharing side of things. This is something that gives me the feeling of having communicated or expressed myself without contributing to the mess of social media, without anyone ever having to see it. Or I like to think I’m following after Thoreau, Dickinson, etc. What if Emily Dickinson had had the Internet? Would she do hot takes on twitter, keep a weird indieweb website, or just still be offline making her handmade fascicles anyway? (People who never joined social media do exist. Conversely, I think some people who I know “in real life” and thought weren’t on social media might secretly be on social media. The transparently online with their real names are just a small subset of the population.)
• I’ve experimented with following RSS feeds, and might do more with that, but right now I’m not looking at them.
• And I might even get back into social media again at some point, in some way.

I’m excited to read this Filterworld book once it is finished. And Dirt is a newsletter worth subscribing to. I just signed up to lurk on their Discord. We will see if I get kicked off for ruining their scene or something - I don’t really know how Discord works if they can even do that; But Dirt seems like a cool place and I just feel like I have a long history, going back to before even the hipster garabe times, of my presence and interest in a scene or culture being the indicator that it is no longer cool. Sorry, I’m coming to silently ruin your scene.

Standalone post link: Link - Filterworld - Algorithm Cleanse

Link: Student Journalists Reveal a Changing World. Let Them. | Margaret Renkl

Type: Opinion Essay

Source: The New York Times

The high school newspaper is not the enemy of frightened adults. It is one of the few windows they will ever have into what is actually happening in their own children’s world, perhaps in their own children’s hearts. Isn’t that what a parent is supposed to want?

Censoring students like this just frustrates me to no end - even more than banning books. Not much respect from me for the adults who engage in this type of action - they appear to me fearful, incurious, and cowardly. Above all else, they are absolutely failing as educators and parents because of their unwillingness to actually listen to and engage with the thoughts and learning of young people. Or maybe the goal is not learning and thinking at all, just subservience? Prove me wrong.

Standalone post link: Link - Student Journalists Reveal a Changing World. Let Them.

Link: “Glass Sight” | Tyler Mitchell

Type: Poem

Source: Poetry, September 2022)

…If poets travel
from one image to the next, what comes of the ribbons
of roads breathing between letters? There are ways out of this sequencing broad shoulders flexing commas
young lungs. The crunching of leaves scrape the mind,
deer travel along the concrete. Their chance to exist,
the split second of impact when broken antlers become the page.
The crack on the window unfolds to a map…

Maybe my favorite little poem from this issue of Poetry. I keep reading it again and again.

Standalone post link: Poem Link - Glass Sight