Upgraded the primary domain for this site to its final form here at the end of the internet:

Welcome to joshuaw.xyz

(Also updated the introductory text of my home page a bit to reflect this change.)

Standalone post link: welcome to joshua w dot xyz

I read A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger 📚

Standalone post link: Reading A Snake Falls to Earth

‘February Break’ Ideas and To-Dos

a longlist, unfiltered and unedited other than select hyperlinks added:

Write book reviews finally

Get my website going again

Set up new bed in bedroom

Hate everyone

Ignore the haters

Therefore, ignore myself

Keep a diary

Do laundry

Figure out something for the hellscape that is our backyard

Go outside in the early mornings and stay there rather than driving to work and sitting in my cubicle

Read some books

Play some video games

Play some records

Get some lamps

Low-key get some good work done, just the work that I want to do and never let myself do when I’m at work

Cook some food

Go in the wilderness

Go to the record store and the bookstore

Go to a museum or two, art gallery

Destroy someone’s scene - make snooty people in a gallery or hipster store deal with my kids and/or just my fat awkward self

Give some attention to my dog our dog their dog the dog named Luna that lives in our house with us

Trim beard and haircut

Heal the world, make it a better place

We are the world

/ IATA - WATA (I AM THE ASSHOLE / WE ARE THE ASSHOLES)

/ “Lord, is it I?”

/ god damn you god damn me god damn us god damn we god damn us all

Buy a car

Watch some movies

Get out my CDs and cassettes

I have wasted my life

Standalone post link: February Break Ideas and To-Dos

I started reading Moon Witch Spider King by Marlon James the other night. I’m currently at 21% completion.

Pre-ordered copy that came in at King’s English, and ended up being signed.

Standalone post link: Reading Moon Witch Spider King

Also started reading today A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib.

I’ve had this, and, actually, all of Abdurraqib’s other books on my to-read list for a while now – I took the occasion of Black History Month to move this one to the top of my list and start reading.

Copy from the Holladay Branch of the Salt Lake County Library. And the blurb writers on the back are all on my have-read and/or to-read lists, too: Marlon James, Jacqueline Woodson, Clint Smith, Brit Bennett

Standalone post link: Reading A Little Devil in America

I’ve also been playing a bit of Pokémon Legends Arceus lately. Gave it to my son for his birthday recently and I guess I could say I started playing it at his urging, but truly I was just curious to try it anyway and I do kind of like it.

It’s not exactly Breath-of-the-Wild-levels of intricate open world, but I’m much more engaged by it than I was by Pokémon Shield. I probably will play some more of this game as well. (I think when my kids begged me to try Shield last year I stopped after 20-30 minutes, and I never went back to it.)

Standalone post link: Also Playing Pokémon Legends Arceus

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>
<!--mwahaahahaha-->  
<!--mwahaahahaha-->

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

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

‘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

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