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Tagged by Scott and Luke and in thoughtful return, Iâm answering the Blog Questions Challenge here. Some of these answers may overlap with the answers I gave Manu for his People & Blogs series, so Iâll do my best to do something a bit different. Please visit Manuâs P&B site though, and read through many of the excellent interviews there. Much credit to Bear Blog for these questions. Why did you start blogging in the first place? I noted how I appreciated the early bloggers, in particular from the Pyra Labs/Blogger crew, but to go back even further, I was fond of journaling early. Much of that was in the form of drawings as a child, then coupled with text. It wasnât until I read about how musicians like Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam would keep copious journals, and in particular, Henry Rollinsâ Get In The Van, showed me that documenting your life was important as a record of a lived person. Rollins would later read from these journals early in his transition from full-time musician to spoken word artist, and the storytelling inspired me. Since I was online, and web design had captivated me, it all came together. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Iâm currently using the lovely static site generator, Eleventy (11ty). It pushes to a GitHub repository, which triggers a deploy to Netlify. After using so many different platforms over the decades, with my posts and data semi-locked in MySQL databases, the idea of a fast, file-first, SSG was the way I absolutely wanted to go when I started blogging at this domain. Steph Angoâs File Over App is a thoughtful read on data portability. Have you blogged on other platforms before? As mentioned just before this, yes. I started with Geocities, Livejournal, tried Greymatter, then Movable Type was the first to make it all click. I got really comfortable and pushed that system far â Gapers Block was the most involved version that I had done with multiple blogs running under one instance with different layouts and sections and includes all over the place. Dean Allenâs (RIP) Textpattern stole my heart away for many years after MT got acquired, and then I stopped blogging when Weightshift became my focus, and social media started to bloom. Weightshift used various CMSs for clients: MT, TXP, ExpressionEngine, CraftCMS, Wordpress, etc. I toyed with Tumblr, and other things, but eventually restarted with Jekyll, but quickly switched to 11ty. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard thatâs part of your blog? Most everything starts in Bear. I have a master note of ideas, that links out to other notes and I keep adding new ones, revisit others, and check off published ones. When do you feel most inspired to write? Whenever an idea strikes. This can happen at any time and drafts are started anywhere. I generally publish in the evening though. Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? I used to be more immediate with my publishing decades ago, adhering to a near daily schedule. These days, some thought and care goes into each post, and if possible, I like to add a touch of flavor to a post, like the rotated album covers for the Music in 2024 post. What are you generally interested in writing about? How we as humans live in a world ever-changing because of technological influence and societyâs adoption and adaptation to it. I love travel so posts about cultures and countries, as well as overlanding and camping domestically. And personal things that are more feeling the feels. Who are you writing for? Myself first, but through a lens of, âthis information or thought could help someone else, and/or Iâd love to share a different perspective thatâs unique to me.â Whatâs your favorite post on your blog? 2023 in the Rearview is a big one, and I worked on that for a while. Taken for a Ride is a good one I think about taking a Waymo autonomous vehicle for the first time, but I like the sort of pieces that come from a more emotional and resilient place, like Let This Be a Moment, that allow me to work through things. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature? Iâm very content with 11ty. Iâm constantly evolving and refactoring the design and code where I can see improvement. This is a lovely mode to be in: itâs iterative like software development than constantly new like marketing. As for features: a work section (underway), and better ways to showcase my photography, which is a longtime interest and activity for me. Tag âem. Iâm going to tag Bix, Ethan, Gosha, Grant, Matt, Piper, Rachel, Simon, Susan, Thu, and Winnie. Read on nazhamid.com or Reply via email
We are tenants with landlords who want to make sure that we canât leave the building or go hang out with friends elsewhere, all while showing us how happy we should be with the limitations imposed on us. â Den Delimarsky A long, weighty one, but very worth the read. Visit original link â or View on nazhamid.com â
01/05 PREDATORS, AMERICAN GREED â Steven Soderbergh Director Steven Soderbergh's media recap of 2024. It's fascinating to see how many movies he watched multiple times, and the reverse watch of the original Star Wars trilogy. Phantom of the Menace twice too? Visit original link â or View on nazhamid.com â
Iâm including the most memorable, impactful, or beloved works ofâcreative genius, or something, that Iâve encountered this year. Iâm not a critic; I am mostly just talking about things I liked. These are tremendous to me. I hope they can be tremendous to you, too. â Anh The list is great, but this one is also visually gorgeous. Best experienced in a browser near you. Visit original link â or View on nazhamid.com â
Itâs idealistic and very millennial of me to reminiscence the early days of Web innocence, unbound creativity it hosted and wonderful lack of monetisation of virtually every aspect of being online. We canât turn back time. But, individually and collectively, we can strive for better as the Web evolves as a home for work, knowledge, community, and love. We can resist the ongoing enshittification and corporate capitalism. So I jotted down an non-exhaustive list of what Iâd love the future Web to be. â Karolina Szczur A great list. Visit original link â or View on nazhamid.com â
More in literature
The techno-utopian poem by Richard Brautigan.
My youngest son this summer is working as an intern with a Houston law firm and one of the partners loaned him a copy of The Regional Vocabulary of Texas (University of Texas Press, 1962) by E. Bagby Atwood, whose foreword begins: âThe present study deals with a vocabulary which, although still in use, is to a great extent obsolescent. Many regional words reflect an era of the not-too-distant past when most citizens were rural, or at least knew something of rural life.â  Atwood was a professor of linguistics and philology who taught at the University of Texas at Austin. For this native Northerner, his lists of words mingle the familiar with the exotic. For instance, lagniappe is a word I have never heard spoken and originally encountered years ago in Twainâs Life on the Mississippi (1883):  "We picked up one excellent word â a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word â âLagniappe.â They pronounce it lanny-yap . . . When a child or a servant buys something in a shop â or even the mayor or governor, for aught I know â he finishes the operation by saying, â âGive me something for lagniappe.â The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of liquorice-root.â  I think of the phrase âbakerâs dozen.â Atwood writes of the word: âThere is no doubt that, as the major dictionaries state, lagniappe is a gallicized version of the Spanish la ñapa [a little extra] . . .â  Another word Iâve never heard someone use in conversation but knew from print is hant or haint, variations on haunt. Southerners use it as a noun meaning ghost and I think I first found it in one of Faulknerâs novels. I encountered some of Atwoodâs words in dialogue from old Western movies. Draw, for instance, a noun meaning a dry creek bed or arroyo; hoosegow, meaning a jail, from the Spanish juzgado, a courthouse; tote used as a verb meaning to carry, and tow sack, meaning a âbig burlap sack,â which reminds me of its usage as a related noun in Louisiana-born Tony Joe Whiteâs song âPolk Salad Annieâ (1968):  âNow, everyday âfore supper time Sheâ go down by the truck patch And pick her a mess oâ Polk salad And carry it home in a tote sack.â  Other novelties: mott, meaning âa clump of treesââ; shinnery (sounds like an Irish surname), âoak-covered landâ; olla, from the Spanish, meaning a âlarge crock for waterâ; smearcase, from the German meaning âhomemade curd cheeseâ; and cush-cush, âcorn meal preparation.â I especially like shivaree, a âburlesque serenade . . . associated with re-marriage,â and mosquito hawk or snake doctor for âdragon fly.â Blinky means âbeginning to turn sour (milk).â  Our language has grown increasingly homogenous since Bagby published his study. Television and the internet have flattened things out, culled regionalisms, made American English more universal, less colorful. He reminds us that language percolates from the bottom up, socially speaking. So much of the language Atwood documents is vivid and colorful to contemporary ears. As H.L. Mencken writes in The American Language (1919):     âWhat are of more importance, to those interested in language as a living thing, are the offendings of the millions who are not conscious of any wrong. It is among these millions, ignorant of regulation and eager only to express their ideas clearly and forcefully, that language undergoes its great changes and constantly renews its vitality. These are the genuine makers of grammar, marching miles ahead of the formal grammarians. . . .The ignorant, the rebellious and the daring come forward with their brilliant barbarisms; the learned and conservative bring up their objections.â
In the world of jigsaws, there can be a fine line between productivity and pleasure The post Puzzled appeared first on The American Scholar.
Born in Iran and raised in Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919âNovember 17, 2013) was fourteen when she dropped out of school and eighty-eight when she won the Nobel Prize for smelting language into keys to âthe prisons we choose to live inside.â Having lived in writing for nearly a century, through the rise and fall of dictatorships, the ferment and fizzle of movements, the flickering of moral fashions, she understood uniquely both the power of the written word and its limitations, the way books should be read âfor illumination, to enlarge oneâs perception of lifeâ and not for indoctrination,âŠÂ read article
A discussion with Marjan Ehsassi, executive director of FIDE North America, about citizens' assemblies and how they can be used in politics, business, and academia.
