I finished reading Robin Sloan's new novel, "Moonbound". He has a lot of fun ideas and presents them well. What I didn't love as much was the ending. This has happened for me with all his books, especially "Sourdough". I felt like it just sort of wrapped up suddenly because he was running out of paper or something. Otherwise, it was a fun, interesting, enjoyable read.
I had a headache from yesterday afternoon until, well, now. It's bumming me out, so I'm sitting here futzing with my blogs and that helps :).
I got all fired up about, er, firing up a couple of my stalled blogs. Then...crickets. I don't feel much like writing. Nothing is interesting right now, as I watch the world I thought I was living in simply disintegrate. So, stop reading the news, I guess? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I signed up for sewing classes. Six, 3-hour classes. I really only want to learn how to alter t-shirts but we'll be making a pillowcase, apron, and tote bag. Should be interesting.
Whenever I change blogging platforms or domain names or simply post to several places, I feel a twinge of guilt. How will my "audience" feel about the changes? Does it confuse things?
I sometimes get comments like, "I have trouble finding things you've written because they're all over the place."
I don't get a lot of traffic, but it's also not zero traffic, so I feel some responsibility. But why? I am not writing for money or influence or popularity. I write to better understand what I'm thinking about, and sometimes share the result. I write so that I have a record of those things. I write, almost entirely, for me.
In that light, I shouldn't worry about whether my RSS feed is consistent or if people need to follow me in too many places. I don't want to be a dick about it, but c'mon, it's an unimportant personal blog by some nobody on the internet. Let's not overthink it.
So, if you're one of the people who actually wants to read the things I write, I apologize for the scattershot way I go about publishing them. But, honestly, I'll probably always be this way.
With any luck, no one will notice this post. I'm only testing to see if the blog still renders when using Tinderbox 10.
I can feel the pendulum swinging back toward complexity. Or at least toward variety. I get so bored posting to only one blog. Doing that is the Correct Answer™ but after a while I just want something new to play with. So... 👋🏻
I am going to try limiting myself to one blog/one wiki. That means baty.net and wiki.baty.net only. Nothing is forever, but for now, please stand by.
My wife called from the gym and wanted to know which plumber we'd called to replace our water heater. The work was done in 2021 so I was pretty sure I'd find it in Emacs/Orgmode. Probably in a Denote note. After about 45 seconds of looking, I got so tangled up in unwanted windows and buffers and minibuffers and missed key bindings that I ended up punting and using Spotlight, which only got me close. This is not the first time this has happened to me when I needed some tidbit of information quickly. The whole situation has upset me to the point of putting me back on the get-out-of-emacs train.
Just finished catching up on my RSS/Mastodon/Forum feeds. I used to love doing that. Today, and more often than not lately, I find the process to be depressing. I haven't even read the news sites yet. Everything seems awful right now with very few things improving in a way that matters. I should go take a walk.
I still dream of only having one blog. Currently, I have the opposite of one blog. What would I need for one blog? I would need something that felt future-proof. It would need to be able to handle long text posts, posts with lots of images, short posts with no title, daily notes, custom post types, etc. Ghost works for some of this. Kirby works for others. Tinderbox works for some. You see what I mean?
I've moved daily.baty.net, a static website generated using Tinderbox, to my new VPS at Hetzner. It's a 2CPU/2GB server for around $4.00/month. Simple and cheap. It was previously on a Digital Ocean droplet which cost twice as much.
I wonder what it would be like to be someone who simply decides something, then follows through, forever. I think I'd like that.
I keep installing the Org 9.7.x package and Org keeps reverting to 9.6.x. I don't want to use the built-in version, but it seems I'm stuck with it. I package-install version 9.7 and it works. Well, it works until the next time I upgrade packages or maybe just touch something the wrong way. I can't figure it out and don't feel like bothering with it.
Don't tell anyone, but I've been copying all of the new posts from Baty.net (Ghost) to my old Kirby CMS version of the blog. You know, just in case. I must admit though, that I prefer managing content in Ghost. This was a surprise.
Have I mentioned that I re-subscribed to Medium? I still root for them, for some reason, so I'm paying $4/month for the privilege of posting there and reading Member Only posts. It won't last, because I only cross-post from baty.net almost no one reads my posts on Medium anyway.
I look around and all I see are choices. Apps on the computer. Cameras on my shelves. Books in bookcases. Bags in the closet. Shoes on the rack. Streaming options on the TV. Pens in the case. I am very fortunate, but today I feel overwhelmed by it all. I feel like my brain is vibrating and causing a disturbing background hum that drowns out everything.
Yesterday I included a copy/pasted summary of my wiki notes for the day. I don't think I'll keep doing that. If I were going to continue along those lines, I'd rather just do a weekly newsletter with notes collected from the week. I tried something like that once, and ran out of steam quickly.
If I were to complain about LLMs "stealing" my public writing, I worry that I'd just be wildly over-valuing my words.
Today in the wiki:
Here we are. Again. Still? A tiny textarea in a weird bit of html and javascript in a web browser. I can't seem to quit it.
Maybe I'll do something like what Phil is doing: Write here in TiddlyWiki all day, then paste the whole thing into a blog post at the end of the day. Or vice versa. Why, though? The whole idea of the wiki is that I can just blurt stuff out without it "going anywhere". If I copy it to a blog, it'll end up in someone's RSS feed, defeating the purpose. I dunno.
Why do you suppose it is that I am more inclined to write stuff if it's going to be public? I have to force myself to journal in my paper notebooks or local Org-journal files, but writing here comes easy and without hesitation. Is it a weird form of vanity? Is it some latent exhibitionist tendency? I can't explain it.
Publishing this wiki relies on a few things. First, TiddlyWiki, of course. I don't like embedding images. I use a plugin and WebDAVNav Server so I can drag and drop images but have them referenced and not embedded. If I didn't need drag-and-drop I would only need the Timimi plugin locally. I deploy the wiki using a simple Makefile which rsyncs everything to a VPS. It's not much, really. So why do I worry about it?
I wish Hookmark worked with Emacs
I'm toying with the idea of highlighting the relevant bits of each entry here. The thinking is that it will help people scan what can otherwise feel like a wall of text.
AI-generated text, images, and video are a liability for those who use them.
I'm pretty sure AI could write Seth Godin's blog. If it isn't already.
I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.” ― Bo Burnham
As if there's not enough noise about Apple in my feeds, WWDC makes it all so much worse. It's weeks of meaningless speculation, rumors, and "wish lists" leading up to the event, followed by a depressing barrage of barely-informed opinions about everything (I don't mean yours, of course). I'm going to shut down, socially, while the smoke of annoyance clears.
I'm starting to think that I've wasted way too much time wrangling with the metadata/properties around my notes. Keywords, categories, dates, sources, URLs, authors, etc. I almost never use any of them, yet I've spent countless hours making sure they're consistent and accurate. Perhaps I should move on.
I rewatch "The Lure" every so often when I feel the need for a Polish mermaid-stripper-horror-musical-comedy.
Kev Quirk and I exchanged emails throughout May as part of his PenPals project. It was fun. Here's our conversation.
Another from Dave's post.
I've pretty much abandoned the idea of "taking notes." I mean, I write stuff down that I don't want to forget
This is how I think of PKM now, too. I just want to be able to look stuff up.