Liked: On the caustic focus on temporality in social media…
social is thereby forcing us to not only think shallowly, but to make our shared histories completely valueless
Ann Althouse wrote that “part of blogging is choosing what not to blog” and, while she may have been referring to a particular case, it is an interesting point.
It’s something I’ve been considering more lately myself.
It’s funny how the internet works sometimes: there were two moments of serendipity related to a post I’ve been working on over the past couple of days (completed last night and will be posted later.)
It’s been frosty for the past couple of days but this morning was the first time there was that satisfying winter crunch underfoot.
The depth of frost is directly proportional to the volume of crunch.
By stepping back I think I’ve found a new direction for one of the drafts I was having problems with.
For the first time in a while I pulled out my notebook and pen and started to write rather than type – or tap. What flowed from the pen bridged a gap between that draft and a previous entry in the notebook, an intersection that suddenly made it all make sense.
In the spirit of NaNoWriMo there have recently been challenges to blog (or micro blog) every day for a month; this has also followed through to December. It’s great that these have been set in order to encourage people to blog more, to write more, to build a regular habit, but I’m personally past that.
My wife and I went to dinner with a couple of friends on Saturday evening, nothing fancy as it was more for the company than the food.
The restaurant was busy and noisy making it difficult to sometimes hear just across the table. After a while, one group left and I remarked that the “noisy table” had gone and we could hear ourselves think.
I know I said I would concentrate on the writing and not worry about the site, but…
The look of pages with only a little text on was annoying me, it seemed scrunched up. I moved the footer section outside of the enclosing DIV so that I could auto size the main section such that the footer always appears at the bottom of the available space.
I only discovered last night that you could put view-source: in front of the URL in (many) Android browsers to get the page source. Very handy for trying to troubleshoot dark mode CSS issues on the go.
As part of his 30 day series on dealing with anxiety CJ Chilvers wrote about the beneficial effects of music and it being, at least, a temporary way to get “out of your own head” and act as a coping mechanism.
Over the past couple of days, I re-watched Blade Runner 2049 while commuting. I still stand by my comments that the soundtrack doesn’t hold a candle to Vangelis’ score for the original but it started to grow on me.
When she was younger, my wife used to work with autistic children at a nearby specialist school so she had plenty of experience identifying symptoms and helping those experiencing them. This is why she is confident that I am at least somewhere on the spectrum.
In response to my post about eye contact Bix states:
I take issue with the language deeming eye contact “right” and “polite”. It isn’t; it’s merely typical… What’s right, what’s polite, is respecting that not everyone’s brain functions typically.
Ever since childhood I can remember it being intensely uncomfortable to hold eye contact with others. I know it’s right, I know it’s polite, I know it’s how you get the most out of speaking to them but it’s hard.
I thought there was an issue with “On this day” but this is genuinely the first time I’ve posted on a 25th of November.
Despite trying to foster slow writing I find myself struggling to return to a couple of drafts. After a busy weekend I am mentally distanced from thoughts I was having just a scant few days ago.
I’ve now been able to re-request the certificate so, hopefully, everything should be back to normal in a couple of hours.
The Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate hasn’t auto-renewed so I’m having to try forcing HTTP for now until it does. It’s frustrating that there’s no mechanism to trigger it or remove the certificate on this host.
Liked: New Blogging 1 – Building Blogchains…
More on blogchains from Tom Critchlow.
I am deliberately trying to instill an ethic of slow writing, taking my time to pull different things together over a number of days, working on something for an extended period rather than just posting before I forget it or lose interest.