Notes on stuff I'm thinking about. For short-form posts, visit the stream.
Thinking out loud about publishing photos
I've been thinking a lot about publishing photos for myself and my close circle, and in a second iteration of memories. The principal lines of thought are these:
A couple of nights ago, I was about to post a song on The Headphonist, my music journal, when I decided the design I'd put up a couple of months ago wasn't doing it for me anymore. And because who needs sleep?, I went ahead and started hacking together a whole new structure for the website.
Back in 2019, before the world ended, I was trying to learn JavaScript. Serious JavaScript, not just hiding and showing things like I'd always done for microinteractions in websites.
As one of my exercises, I published an app to collect people's favorite things. It was centered around a single sentence saying "My favorite [a] is [b]". There was no purpose other than having fun, it was totally anonymous, and I didn't know what I was doing at all, so as soon as it started breaking apart I had to put it away.
Taste dictates what music you listen to, your favorite food, your drink of choice, your clothing style, the books you read, the TV series you follow, the movies you watch — and rewatch. How you speak, how you flirt, how you react to other people. How you present yourself to the world.
Beyond that, taste dictates who you're friends with, and that's either because they match what you value, or because you appreciate their own taste. In some wonderful cases, it's both of these things.
Social media goes against all that.
tl;dr: I added comments to this blog
A few days ago I stumbled upon this blog post by Matizeta where he talks about "the alive internet" and shares several ways to bring humanity back to the web.
I made a photostream that I own, not Zuck or anyone else.
For years I've been having a love-hate relationship with Instagram. I'm still there because I value the interaction with my friends, some of them remote, but I'm always annoyed by the quantity of ads that show up in my feed.
Now that I'm fully coming back to the small/indie/personal web, I'm trying to take with me some of the activities I use the corporate web for, and it occurred to me that taking a piece of instagram with me would be a great idea.
I've seen three blog posts about this in my feeds today, and it's notable that so far everybody avoids openly sharing that they blog.
I miss email as a personal communication tool. Surely I still use it, but it is 20% paper trail for transactions, and 80% cold-messaging from companies I don't know—or plain old spam, if there's even a difference.
This is a note from my journal that works as a constant reminder of being kind, something that's very important on my current journey. I share it here because, as simple and silly as it may seem, sometimes finding something simple at the right time can give someone a shift in perspective, and I've found innumerable things on my own path that I'm extremely grateful for.
In its simplest form, journaling is keeping a record of our thoughts, emotions, and reactions to our circumstances. It gives us a history to revisit, reference material that would otherwise get lost in unreachable corners of our memory. I've gone back to pages from 4 or 5 years ago and been surprised to realize that I'd already lived through situations similar to current events I considered new.