Journal

Melting Face (1982) In high school, I mowed lawns for extra cash. I remember vividly the time I was mowing our neighbor’s back yard and I had the idea for a painting (see above). I actually stopped the mower and went inside to start painting immediately. I miss feeling so creative that I’d stop whatever I was doing because I had an idea. Had second sewing class yesterday. We made drawstring bags. Well, tried to. I struggled with the sewing machine for half the class. It kept jamming. And when it wasn’t jamming, I was mis-threading it. We cut several pieces of fabric for the first time. That was harder than I expected. Like my dad often said while building something, “I cut it twice and it’s still too short.” I didn’t finish. I still need to make and thread the drawstring. ...

Websites I want. Newsletter observation. Things I don’t want to think about.

I’m having a lot of trouble staying away from social media. The idea was to limit myself to checking once or twice a day, but I still find myself reaching for it every time there’s a lull in my thoughts or as soon as I finish something. It’s insidious. I’m convinced that social media is bad for my brain and it’s definitely bad for my attitude. I’ll keep trying. I don’t think I should even allow the once-a-day checking. Perhaps I’ll bookmark just the notifications tab and check that, since I don’t want to be rude and not respond to people. ...

Notes from today Have you ever looked into your completely disheveled pantry and said, “That does it! I’m fixing this right now!”? I did that today. After two hours of, “What the hell is this doing here?”, everything that doesn’t belong in the pantry is not in the pantry, and everything that remains in the pantry is where it belongs in the pantry. This feels really good. More on Micro.blog I’m a week into my Micro.blog Revisited experiment and have not come to any conclusions. There are two questions I need to answer: ...

News article nested negatives. Freddie deBoer on the Copernican Principle

Don’t worry about inconsistent posts and what about daily.baty.net?

I can’t figure out how to coax Hugo into generating full URLs to images when I’m using Page Bundles. The whole point of bundles is that I can use links to images like [](yet-another-self-portrait.jpg) and it just works. But it doesn’t work in RSS feeds. Not all RSS readers automatically figure out the full URLs. The figure short codes should at least work, but don’t. Frustrating.

With all of the free time and curiosity I have, you’d think I’d be good at something by now. I’m starting to figure out that if I don’t know where to put something, I probably shouldn’t be keeping it to begin with.

Social media. Org-mode. Idiots with boats.

I am very poorly today and hate everybody and everything

I’ve been sitting here staring at the screen and clicking things mostly at random and finding nothing that sparks my interest. Am I reaching the end of something? Feels like I’m reaching the end of something. I just hope it’s the beginning of something else.

I don’t have any real plans today other than one appointment at lunch. How shall I waste spend the day?

No more Ghost instance and a new fire pit.

Maybe these daily notes are more like an internal monolog, published. The microblog will be for things I want to deliberately share. This would be what I’m using Mastodon for, currently, but I’ll crosspost to Mastodon instead. It seems that everywhere I turn, someone is giddy about Oasis getting back together. I’m not embarrassed to go on record stating that I absolutely cannot stand their music, so consider me nonplussed.

Thankfully, I’ve got things to do in real life today. Otherwise, I’d be wasting the day by fretting over the long-term use of Emacs. I need to get past that, but not today. I can’t think of anything more useless and boring than trying to craft the perfect AI prompt so that it will generate something useless and boring for me.

I talk about gear and process a lot because it helps fill the gaps left by a dearth of ideas. All of the handwringing around AI or Apple or [trending topic here] has become boring. So has the naval gazing around blogging and social media and everything. I need a new thread to pull.

Abandoning the hours I spent making little scripts and shortcuts to do the things I normally do in Emacs, but in Bear, etc. instead, I spent time yesterday doing the same thing with the Emacs versions. I feel better about that, because I’m better at Emacs to begin with, so this feels like adding on to something I have rather than starting over with something new. Speaking of Emacs, I’ve added evil-mode back into my Emacs config. Now I’m really confused. I have two conflicting sets of muscle memory, both of which I quite like, but they can’t really coexist peacefully. I tried Demon-mode and other kinda-evil-but-not-really modes and none are what a want. I’m going to need to decide. ...

Backing away from my move away from Emacs again. I just can’t quit it.

I went to post something just now, but stopped to make a teeny tweak the Hugo frontmatter. Now I don’t remember what I was coming here to write. Good morning, I guess ¯_(ツ)_/¯. On the plus side, I woke up feeling actually relieved that the blog is on Hugo. Can’t explain it, but it seems like a good thing. Neither my wife nor I have been to Europe, so I’m planning a trip there for later this fall. I don’t even know which country we should start at. I’m thinking Italy. ...

Fighting my Johnny Decimal plans.