changes

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 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

On spending Saturday afternoon driving around two counties in the rain making returns of dumb shit I bought online that doesn’t fit or that I don’t really need, and on being too self conscious to go to the art museum and go in with wet clothes on the last day of an exhibition I wanted to see, even though I was just a few blocks from it and going there was my original plan

• Most of the new music that I queued up to listen to while driving was unfortunately not that exciting to me

• Parley’s Canyon was stunning in the rain - the wisps of clouds hanging around the peaks and trailing up the side canyons, the wet washed sandstone faces several shades darker than their familiar sunbleached appearance, the scrub oak leaves just humming with so much green, thick life

• I hydroplaned four times, but I recovered before crashing every time and I’m okay

• I think I’ve finally cracked the textile-encoded messages letting me know that J. Crew and J. Crew “Factory” actually just don’t want short, fat people to wear their clothes

• I don’t care about going into Target with wet clothes from the rain

• I don’t care about going back out into the rain after shopping in Target, since I was able to cover my purchases so they wouldn’t get ruined

• I do I guess care about going into an art museum with wet clothes from the rain, but maybe that was just an excuse to indulge my self-consciousness

• I can hopefully browse and buy the artist’s book associated with the exhibition later, which is what I probably actually really wanted

• I have several hundred dollars coming off my credit card balances now

• I maybe should have stopped somewhere and taken pictures - I drove that way because I had to return some things to one of the “factory stores” by Park City, and I guess all in all it was worth it

Standalone post link: On spending Saturday afternoon driving around two counties in the…

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

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

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]

1. Not sure why but I deliberately chose to cover up the part of the Nightcrawling cover with the “Oprah Book Club 2022” sticker.

2. The desire to take this picture with the book displaying from the app on my phone screen forced me to finally get out our old Nikon DSLR camera. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, as I’m increasingly frustrated with the supposedly great camera on my iPhone 13 mini and its well-intentioned attempts to optimize and fix everything to how a photo is supposed to look for me - I like the mistakes and the limitations, though. Now I just need to learn how to use the old camera again, probably get it cleaned up, so that the mistakes are on purpose.

Standalone post link: Nightreading Nightcrawling Moonwalking

Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out [66%]

by Susan Kuklin

[currently reading - started on 2022.08.15]

Another day, another challenged book.

Standalone post link: Currently Reading - Beyond Magenta

2022.08.11 (committed)

• Added a [more of ‘Title’] link at the bottom of the main microblogish rss index
• Added [more/less] buttons to recent updates on homepage and ‘new/now’ list pages
• Improvements to the functionality of the ‘recent images’ section of the home page
• Moved ‘links’ into their own main section

2022.07.22 (committed)

• Added Breadcrumbs to default single and list pages (https://gohugo.io/content-management/sections/#example-breadcrumb-navigation)
• Started organizing reading updates and other content into non chronological sections

Related still to-do

• Standardize [more/less] functionality across all list pages
• Create a standard ‘gallery’ partial
• Re-create the jdw-gallery page (page showing just the images I consider to be my own creations not stealing/screenshotting/remixing
• Standardize breadcrumbs across all templates
• Update templates
• Much more post/static page reorganization
• Fix and standardize image tags in all old posts

Standalone post link: Changelog - 2022.08.11

Been thinking a lot about curation, both professionally and personally. Where, when, how, whether to do it.

I’ve been in a holding pattern about sharing things for a long time now - I have digital and physical notebooks full of things to potentially share (good and helpful things, I believe), but it seems too big a deal to share them. There are too many options, each with benefits and drawbacks, each with different audiences, or in some cases no audience at all.

Started playing hard with Pinterest at work last week as a potential way out of this, then promptly took vacation time and went camping out of cell range for several days. Now I’m having second thoughts about what I was starting to build there. Then third thoughts, that I should do more, and do it in more places.

Pinterest? Wakelet? Tweet threads? Some Google Doc? Destiny Discover Collections? My own website? My district library website? My district edtech website? Just leave it alone since my district has another new main webpage that kind of curates a little bit of what I was thinking but that I’m not involved in? Yes to all?

Do I go to where the most people are, even if it doesn’t always make the most organizational sense, or I don’t like the way it looks or works? Do I just use whatever platform is easy or makes the most sense to me? Do I belligerently insist on my own platform and expect people to come to me if they come at all? Do I let it go? Most other people don’t have this pressure to curate and share; maybe I shouldn’t either, and maybe it’s not even helpful or a good idea. Maybe it’s not actually my job. Guess I’m still kind of a mess, mentally uncurated.

Hey, take my little survey and let me know your dream curatorial format/platform, if there were no rules for any of us. I’ll share the results. (I first made this to get input from my co-workers.)

Standalone post link: The Opposite of Curation Isn't A Mess But Silence

I’ve been here before. It’s a cycle for me. The compulsion to exist on social media, followed soon after by silence. I’ve posted variations on this dilemma before. I’ve almost posted on it many times more.

I want and need to just live my life, do my things, think my thoughts, and not be performative about any of it. I despise so much in life that is performative, and I want not to contribute to it. I don’t want to be that person, although I probably still am.

But then, I do want to share and bring to light cool things. People have good ideas, they’ve made interesting or useful things, they need to be supported.

And I want to sort-of connect with people in my weird, limited ways. I usually fail or fear doing this in person. The asynchronicity of some social media platforms is everything to me. I’m not that interested in chat or video calls. I don’t want to get together with you. I just want to share stuff, see other people share stuff, maybe have some sort of time-delayed conversations. I should start writing letters. Or a blog. That’s it.

And yes, wanting to be performative after all. Wanting to make art, or at least something kind of interesting, out of the details of my life, to share my thoughts and perspective.

Is that a performance? A curation? Something always has to be left out.

--

I recently re-read Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and right now I’m listening to the audio of his Book of Delights. I’m fairly inspired by how he is working his way through this. I love how he pays attention / gives attention to so many regular, mundane things. I want to do more of that in my writing, and photography/video, whatever I choose to mess around with and share.

Standalone post link: On Whether To Share Things