a stream

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)

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.)

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.

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.

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

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.”

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.”

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?

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…

Currently Reading: Moonwalking [29%]

by Zetta Elliot and Lyn Miller-Lachmann

[currently reading - started on 2022.08.19]

[Granite Sora ebook copy]

Currently Reading: Nightcrawling [28%]

by Leila Mottley

[currently reading - started on 2022.08.18]

[SLCO Library physical copy]