/blog

I have taken today off sick with the intention of sleeping off the lingering effects of the vaccination but, true to form, my body has other ideas and I've been wide awake for hours. I suppose it's not too bad but there is a definite flu-like feeling about it so resting up for a day seems like a wise idea.

Congratulations to James for migrating his blog to Tanzawa, his indieweb native custom CMS. He has implemented some next level shit in getting to this point including writing his own importers for WordPress content – way beyond my ken!

When I moved the journal to (b)log-In I used a plugin to export entries to a CSV file which I edited in Excel before importing straight into the MySQL database. Just date and content – nothing fancy. WordPress exports are big and messy with all sorts of metadata and I really wouldn't want to deal with all of that which is why WordPress will be sticking around for my archive.

In this week's edition of The Art of Noticing newsletter, Rob Walker links to a post from Marc Weidenbaum on why people should start blogs:

"if you (1) have a focused interest and (2) post regularly about it on social media, then please start a blog ... And, no, I'm not saying cease social media. I'm saying your thoughts deserve their own plot of virtual land."

I completely agree but there's nothing particularly unusual about that, people tell you to start a blog all the time. What's more of note here, at least for me, is that Marc is the author of a book about Aphex Twin's ambient album Selected Ambient Works Volume II. From the preamble:

"Extravagantly opaque, willfully vaporous ”• Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II, released by the estimable British label Warp Records in 1994, rejuvenated ambient music for the Internet Age that was just dawning."

I've seen the book in passing before but never really given it the time of day. Now I'm going to buy it.

Weidenbaum sees the album as a landmark, a shifting of the guard that ushered ambient music into the mainstream – "...from esoteric sound art to central tenet of online culture." This may have been the case but it was a landmark album for me in a very different way.

Being a DJ with my roots firmly in hip-hop and techno, I wasn't so much a vinyl snob but a bit of a purist – it just had to be vinyl played on Technics SL1200's/1210's and I pushed back against the burgeoning digital DJing scene. When SAW2 (as it is known) was first released in the UK it was on CD only and this presented me with a quandary. I had flippantly exclaimed that I wasn't going to buy CDs but here I was, as a devoted Aphex Twin fan who had bought everything he had released up to this point, faced with a decision about whether I should buy what was to become his seminal release.

Suffice it to say that I gave in and purchased a CD player specifically for the purposes of listening to that album. I suppose you've got to start somewhere. 😂

Guilty on all charges. So, what happens now? What will change, if anything?