/reader

E and I baked strawberry shortcake cupcakes today. I have no idea what kind of ruse whoever wrote that recipe was playing, because our cupcakes did not come out looking like the photos from the recipe. Granted, we also skipped half the steps, replaced compote with jam, forwent vanilla extract, and didn't have a piping bag.

"They look like Uncrustables... or idli," I observed.

"Stop!" E cried. "Now I can't unsee it."

In the end we gave up on filling the cupcakes with jam and instead just spread jam and fresh whipped cream on the cupcakes as we ate them. At least they tasted fine. It occurred to me that without vanilla extract the cupcakes we made were essentially the most primitive of cakes (flour, butter, eggs, and sugar). That did not stop me from eating five (5). I am so ashamed...

To assuage my guilt I called V and asked him to accompany me as I walked off the calories. It would have been a good idea had I not also decided to get food on our walk. What is a food-loving soul to do in a place like this?

Pork souvlaki with lemon from Franky's Souvlaki. "What are the most popular meats?" I asked. "Pork and chicken." He winked. "So you want ten of each?"

Then we went to Al-Sham Sweets & Pastries, a place I have been eyeing for a while. The Arab world in general doesn't mess around when it comes to desserts, and baklava and knafeh are two of my favorites. They are creamy (well, knafeh is) and rich and nutty and sweet and full of textural contrasts — all things good in this world. The man that works here has the winningest of smiles.

There are far too many good restaurants on those blocks on Steinway Street between 30th Ave and Astoria Boulevard. I will be back soon, Frith willing.

The dryer is done now. The last thing I'll add before I take the towels out is that I have been thinking about the concept of slack and the role it plays in my life.

Slack is, roughly, having spare capacity in my life. Not being pushed to my limits. Having downtime and room to explore. Being robust to small risks. Not feeling constantly stressed and anxious, having things weighing on my mind. In this post, I’m going to explore the concept of Slack, why the default state of the world is to lack slack, why this matters, and some thoughts on what to do about this.

A few weeks ago, I decided to switch from self-webmention to self-pingback because I like what pingbacks display better. However, I’ve since discovered that there’s a long-known problem when there are too many self-pingbacks in a post, so that only a single self-pingback is sent each time the post is either published or updated.

Republishing a post ten times to get ten pingbacks to send seems unreasonable — so either I need to fix that behavior so all pingbacks send, or switch back to self-webmentions. Option B sounds easier since I don’t know how to code!

So I asked David, one of the Webmention plugin contributors, whether there might be a way to style self-webmentions differently. He set up a Github issue and asked me to document my use case:

Front end display

How self-webmentions look in the comment section

Self-webmentions look like a normal comment, showing my photo, username, and root domain. They also show a short post summary from the start of the post.

How self-pingbacks look in the comment section

Self-pingbacks don’t look like a comment; they do not display a user photo or user name. Instead, the user name lists the title of the referring article.

For my purposes, being able to see which post is linked makes it much more functional as a back-link in a mind garden; I have to hover over the root domain on the self-webmention to see the target URL. I also prefer that the summary text shown from a self-pingback is the linked text from the referring article.

Other comment comparisons

Back end behavior

On the back end, self-webmentions are hard to work with when you have the quantity that I do. There’s no way I have found to filter out self-webmentions to see only other people’s comments, which are much less frequent 😉

WordPress users: if you have a similar use-case, or another reason you’d like to have self-webmentions appear different from native comments, share your comments on the issue too!

• On Writing by Stephen King
• Fairy Tale also by Stephen King

Watching

• After being having it recommended multiple times I've finally given in and started watching Naruto. It takes a bit to get going, but so far I'm enjoying it!
  • Though my watching is currently on pause. Probably until I get back from my vacation.

Projects

• I'm working on a silly side project, which is a Discord bot that posts images to both Bluesky and my GoToSocial instance. It takes care of image conversion, compression, and using LMM to extract a caption (which is not always accurate but 💁‍♂️). It's aptly named image-poster.
• I've been thinking of adding something to my site that pulls data books I'm currently reading from Hardcover and displays it here with my reading progress. Though I likely won't have time to do it until I'm back home.
  • Maybe even add a list of recently finished ones? Or a sortable table of ratings and whatnot?

I read Moby-Dick for the first time a handful of years ago and loved it, but I wouldn’t call myself a Melville scholar. However, attending this conference felt like a great chance to scratch the academic itch without, say, going to grad school.

I ended up spending the whole week taking visual notes, which allowed me to drop into a type of weightless, fixated attention that I’ve really missed in my caregiving life. It also helped give me something to do during panels where I felt a little, uh, out of my depth.

When I’m drawing, words just wash over me. I can pluck the ones that resonate in the moment, then step back at the end of the hour and get a picture of what I took away from the talk. I particularly loved the freedom to just wander into panels where I had no idea what the speakers were talking about, only to come away newly-enthused about some niche avenue into Melville’s work.

Time and time again the attendees emphasized how unique this conference is in its warmth and intellectual diversity. I met scientists and art historians and medievalists and printmakers and disability scholars and tall ship sailors and filmmakers and many, many professors. It was a dreamy, albeit intense, four days.

Here are the notes from every talk I attended, all drawn straight to ink during the speakers’ presentations (usually about 20 minutes per person).

The biggest takeaway was that we need embedded cartoonists at all sorts of academic conferences—and the demand is there! People were so thrilled to see this kind of work coming out of the event, and there are lots of journals hungry to publish unusual creative content alongside academic papers.

Something to pursue…eventually. Got a couple things* to wrap up first.

_{*unfathomably vast creative projects}