Journal

Suddenly, two copies of the weather were showing on journal posts here. I have no idea how that happened. I've cobbled together a fix, but sheesh. This is another thing with Hugo...I don't get how most of it actually works. There's magic going on and I just piggyback off it with a lot of copy and paste and guesses. This is no way to run a website, is it?

Cool, there's now a Lightroom Classic plugin for Glass.photo

What goes here in daily notes and what goes into separate /notes? No idea. Maybe I should kill the idea of /notes and just make everything a regular post. Messy for readers, but cleaner for my brain? Dunno.

I spent hours today making sense of my wiki content using Claude Code and it was a frustrating blast. Sorry, I brought up AI, again. I'm not supposed to do that.

All I wanted to do this morning was to add a class to an image in Hugo. At first I thought I needed to override my theme's image-render hook, but then I learned that could use the built-in Markdown attributes. It required a new setting or two^[1], but worked great for adding a style to images in a single post. In lists, however, the styles are applied to the paragraph above the image, even with wrapStandAloneImageWithinParagraph set to false. I couldn't figure it out, so I just put the paragraph after the images. Not a solution, but solved the problem in this case. This will happen again, I'm sure. Normally, I'd just use raw HTML for this, but the image pipeline in Hugo "bundles" wouldn't work, and I need that.

Speaking of raw HTML. Have you noticed how we're too willing to jump through all sorts of hoops in Markdown just to avoid writing a little HTML.

I spent hours today working on better blockquotes and other tweaks to my theme. Then, suddenly, I couldn't find half of my changes. Some combination of git branches and bad hugo module updates and the whole thing was hosed. Then I noticed my theme's default branch was "master", which shouldn't be the case. No clue how that happened. Also, some of the experimental features I was tinkering with (using claude) leaked into the main branch. Took me more than an hour to fix things. At this moment I'm feeling like I should've stuck with Ghost. 😒

It was so much fun yesterday working on a BBEdit-based workflow with Hugo. Then, today it was ruined by the theme mess I made.

It's all just bunnies on a trampoline, now.

I woke up and started a new Eleventy-based version of this blog. The mood didn't last long this time.

My brain switches from "I'm done using Emacs" to "I'm doing everything forever in Emacs" about once an hour. (I'm typing this in BBEdit.)

Alice has the right idea.

I would like to quit social media completely, but I'm addicted to validation. I tell myself that I actually suffer from FOMO, but the reality is that I'm looking for "likes" and comments and, well, validation. Maybe it isn't validation so much as it is feeling like I'm being seen. I mean, how else can one know they exist in the world?

So many people that I like are starting to share opinions that I don't like.

I sat down this morning, looking to journal a bit about the past few days with extended family, but Emacs threw an error on launch. I fixed that. Then, I couldn't find a note I'd written earlier. Sometimes I would just like to write stuff, take a few notes, and find things later when I need them, but without all the fuss. I don't know how to get there.

Good morning. What shall we wring our hands about, today?

After a week or two with Liquid Glass, I find that I don't really notice it. Those new Safari tabs, on the other hand...

I am off social media for a bit. Whenever I feel myself doing nothing but scrolling or looking for likes or thinking of something "like-able" to say, I know it's time for a break. I'm not cross-posting to Mastodon at all anymore, either. So now, whenever there's a lull in the action of my life, I feel lost. That's the feeling I want to get rid of.

I spent time this morning working (with Claude Code) on displaying full content on the current daily post, but it ended up fighting what the theme wants, so I decided it wasn't worth it. Just for grins, I'm now theme shopping.

You know what, I don't like most themes for any platform. I'll stick with my PaperMod fork for now.

I'm realizing that my enthusiasm for Hugo reflects my current mood about Emacs. When I'm all-in with Emacs, Hugo is my favorite way to manage a blog. When I'm "off" Emacs, I find other ways to blog because my whole Hugo workflow is built using Emacs. The problem right now is that I'm oscillating rapidly between Emacs and not-Emacs, so I post in multiple places. It's fun having options, but I dislike making decisions. 😵‍💫

Here's the part in your review where I stop reading, "It's no masterpiece, but..."

I continue to overthink everything related to my blog(s). I want specific things for specific posts, depending on my mood that day. It's exhausting. The dream of course is to have One Blog. I have 4 active sites right now. That's more than one, for those who are counting.

The new baty.photo blog that I've set up just for posts about photography feels like the right move. That one stays. I like using Ghost for that.

It's the daily.baty.net thing that has me conflicted. I like how both the Tinderbox and (currently) Kirby versions work. They're good for showing a rolling set of random stuff, separated by day. This blog, running Hugo, is less suited for it. It's a combination of long posts, short posts, and these daily notes. Each of which must be clicked through to read. The daily notes don't feel like they belong here, which is why I keep trying to move them elsewhere. Except I don't much feel like maintaining both places. Both the Kirby and Tinderbox versions are custom and fairly complex to use and maintain. Do I really need more of that?

Thing is, none of this matters. Most folks visit via RSS anyway. And those who do actually come here, well, they don't really care how it works. They just want to read the latest stuff (for some reason).

OK, it just happened again. I'm reading this and realizing it doesn't belong in a daily note. It should be a separate post. Here in Hugo that means moving a file on disk and renaming it and modifying the front matter. Ugh, right? If this were in Kirby I'd just toggle "Show title" and it would do the right thing. Now what? Kirby isn't static. It's not difficult to host, but it's not simple, either.

I just also posted this over on daily.baty.net, to see how it felt. See how I am? Like I said, it's exhausting.

(Later): Guess what, tag searches stopped working on the Kirby site. I don't feel like debugging it, so the mood shifts back to Hugo. 🤓

I'm not even supposed to be here today.

I'm a little tired of all of this. Blogging, I mean. I've been writing about the same things on repeat for 25 years. Aren't we all sick of hearing about blogging tools and software and tech and bla bla bla? I am. Maybe I'll open a barber shop, like my great grandfather did.

I don't feel much like writing full-on blog posts, so I keep spouting off little bits and bobs over on Mastodon instead. It's not ideal. I mean, I just added the /notes feature here, so why not use that? I honestly don't know. There's something about it I don't like.

I made the font here a bit smaller and a bit less black. It looked chunky and amateurish to me, somehow. Anyway, it's different now, which might be all I wanted.

Why bother blogging when even I don't feel like reading my posts?

I guess I don't understand why blurring my "content" behind semi-transparent UI controls is any better than hiding it behind easily-distinguished UI controls. The content itself is unusable either way, so why not make the controls easier to see/use?

What do we think about about the whole /notes implementation here? I don't think I like it. I don't feel like creating a whole thing every time I want to share whatever useless thought pops into my head. OTOH, I don't much like putting everything into these daily posts, either. Not on this blog, in this format, anyway. On the other hand, why not just do it here? Problem is already solved, right?

Can you tell there's something going on with me? I don't feel like thinking about all the details and options with everything I do. Is it possible to underthink thinks? Because that's what I'd like to do for a while.

"I've decided to use Emacs for my notes" doesn't really narrow my options all that much, since Emacs is a self-contained infinity of choices all by itself.

I'm reluctantly realizing that most of my cassettes sound like shit. I'm not talking about the inherent limitations of the format. I mean that my specific copies are terrible.

I read about a Leica gathering, where someone wrote, "...you can learn a lot about someone’s journey just by the glass they’re rocking." That's three words (journey, glass, and rocking) in one sentence that I'll never use that way in any sentence. Also, no you can't.

Can you imagine much easier things would be if I...

• Used (only one) digital camera
• Put my photos in one big Lightroom Classic catalog
• Or maybe just used my iPhone with Apple Photos

I saw a post where someone complained that the timeline for some community was "...a sanitized version of reality." My question is, must every "community" always, no matter what, include content from every possible awful corner of the universe? If I wanted "reality", I'd go read about it, or visit just about every other timeline on the internet. I know shit is terrible, that's why I'm hanging out in this nice space for a spell...as a respite. Is it not OK to want to be mildly entertained and amused for a little while? I mean, we don't bitch about, say, The Disney Channel existing, do we? I don't believe people have the right to demand that every space conform to every situation.

I turn 61 years old, today. That seems like a lot.

Too hot for chores, today, so I'm in my air-conditioned office, futzing with AI tools, server options, and my Emacs capture templates.

For some reason, I can't get a markdown-mode-hook to fire and call olivetti-mode when I open a Markdown file in an Emacs buffer. I'm using the exact method that works with org-mode files. It's a small annoyance, but this is why I sometimes want to quit.

Posted: Roll 037

Ozzy died today. For a long time, I expected this to happen any minute. He didn't exactly live a healthy lifestyle. After a certain point, though, it seemed like he might live forever. His "Blizzard of Ozz" tour in 1981 was one of the of the first concerts I saw. I remember leaning my head into a speaker cone, because LOUDER!

With any luck, I'll spend time today far away from the computer and very close to the lake.

Don't you wish I had only one blog? I do.

I'm editing this in (Neo)Vim because I feel like living in normal Vim bindings for a minute, without the grief I cause myself trying to use evil-mode in Emacs.