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Tagged by Scott and Luke and in thoughtful return, I’m answering the Blog Questions Challenge here. Some of these answers may overlap with the answers I gave Manu for his People & Blogs series, so I’ll do my best to do something a bit different. Please visit Manu’s 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 wasn’t until I read about how musicians like Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam would keep copious journals, and in particular, Henry Rollins’ 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? I’m 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 Ango’s 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 — 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 Allen’s (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 that’s 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 society’s 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, “this information or thought could help someone else, and/or I’d love to share a different perspective that’s unique to me.” What’s 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? I’m very content with 11ty. I’m constantly evolving and refactoring the design and code where I can see improvement. This is a lovely mode to be in: it’s 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 ‘em. I’m 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 can’t 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. — Den Delimarsky A long, weighty one, but very worth the read. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
01/05 PREDATORS, AMERICAN GREED — 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 → or View on nazhamid.com →
I’m including the most memorable, impactful, or beloved works of—creative genius, or something, that I’ve encountered this year. I’m 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. — Anh The list is great, but this one is also visually gorgeous. Best experienced in a browser near you. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
It’s 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 can’t 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 I’d love the future Web to be. — Karolina Szczur A great list. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
More in literature
Quite a marvelous season after a protracted Northern winter, spring is the hoariest of subjects for a poem. How many ways are there to be jubilant or render the sensation of “cavorting with the milkmaids,” as an old friend once put it? The effort usually comes off as hackneyed or embarrassingly neo-pagan, like the carrying-on of a dim, histrionic teenager. As close as Philip Larkin ever approaches this state is in his spring poem “Coming” (The Less Deceived, 1955): “On longer evenings, Light, chill and yellow, Bathes the serene Foreheads of houses. A thrush sings, Laurel-surrounded In the deep bare garden, Its fresh-peeled voice Astonishing the brickwork. It will be spring soon, It will be spring soon -- And I, whose childhood Is a forgotten boredom, Feel like a child Who comes on a scene Of adult reconciling, And can understand nothing But the unusual laughter, And starts to be happy.” James Booth in his biography of Larkin calls it “one of his most serenely beautiful poems.” It’s a poem for adults who understand that the world is a complicated place, where happiness is fragile and precious. Typically for Larkin, the phrasing and word choice is unexpected and precise (a rare combination): “Its fresh-peeled voice / Astonishing the brickwork.” So too, “forgotten boredom,” seemingly an oxymoron. Thanks to Larkin we can learn to value flickering spots of happiness. Someone said there are no happy lifetimes, only happy moments. I opened The Complete Poems (ed. Archie Burnett, 2012) again after reading Peter Hitchens’ review of it in the June 11, 2012, issue of National Review. The title is a good one, “Stark Beauties.” I think it’s always a good idea for a reviewer, at least in passing, to address the new or first-time reader, and not make too many assumptions about what he knows. This is especially true in the case of Larkin, who since his death in 1985 has been libeled by self-righteous moralists. His Complete Poems is among the rare essential books published in recent decades, one to shelve alongside Hardy, Robinson, Yeats and Auden. Hitchens writes: “What might the new reader, unprejudiced by reputation, see in this odd, ugly man’s poetry? There is first of all a great deal of gentle kindness, not very well hidden behind a grumpy and unsympathetic public persona.” Hitchens devote additional attention to Larkin’s other spring poem, “The Trees” (High Windows, 1974): “I have never been able to read the lines ‘The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said’ without hot tears forming behind my eyes. I have no real idea why this happens (it just happened again) but I know that it does and that these two immensely simple lines contain a mystery of language which I shall never solve in this life.” Larkin is a poet of deep feeling but never in a manner that is self-serving, like that teenager mentioned earlier. He reminds me of something Yvor Winters wrote about Gerard Manley Hopkins in The Function of Criticism (1967): “[T]he poem is a rational statement about a human experience, made in such a way that the emotion which ought to be motivated by that rational understanding of the experience is communicated simultaneously with the rational understanding: the poem is thus a complete judgment of the experience, a judgment both rational and emotional.”
Padraic X. Scanlan tells the real history of the Irish Potato Famine The post The Root Cause appeared first on The American Scholar.
We are shokunin. Last week I was in Ojai, California, for True’s Founder Camp.[1] James Freeman, founder of Blue Bottle Coffee was in conversation with Jeff Veen, and one of the attendees asked him: “How do you maintain such high quality?” Freeman answers, “‘Maintaining’ is a trigger word for me. You’re either getting better or you’re getting worse. There is no maintaining.” That struck me as he said it. It immediately reminded me of shokunin. Master woodworker and shokunin himself, Tashio Odate describes: Shokunin means not only having technical skill, but also implies an attitude and social consciousness... a social obligation to work his best for the general welfare of the people, [an] obligation both material and spiritual. The Art of Fine Tools If you’ve seen “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” Jiro Ono himself is a shokunin, and I think of his lifelong pursuit of making sushi better every day. Compare that to the rise of supermarket sushi, which can be passable and satiate an immediate need, but never reaches the levels and highs of what master sushi chefs can achieve during their tenure. Sachiko Matsuyama in a piece titled, “Shokunin and Devotion,” writes: When I take guests to visit shokunin at their studios, they often ask how long it takes to make one item. The shokunin, sometimes annoyed by the question, answers: ‘A lifetime’. Among shokunin that I often work with, there are some who are carrying on their family business, and others who have courageously jumped into the field of craftsmanship to become one simply through their own strong will. The independent web, where people are making homes on the internet, on their own domains — creating, building, and sharing with the world — stands in contrast to the walled-off prisons of social media networks. The curation and craftsmanship that individuals develop over time — iterating, tending, evolving, and continuously improving — results in a collection of work that embodies their creators’ intentions and aspirations for care. I’m okay with worse too. We learn from regression or dilution, and that can provide perspective to return to better. You need to know the lows to appreciate the highs. In this current moment with AI reaching a fever pitch in the industry, there’s a palpable tension between those of us who have been working on the Internet for decades, and the young upstarts embracing vibe coding and building with almost completely generative codebases. Many of us possess deep knowledge and experience, having journeyed through different outcomes and encountered those moments when things worsen or improve. We design and code for better, and we design and code because we’re practicing a craft for our lifetimes: Internet shokunin. Full disclosure: I work for True Ventures as a fractional creative director and product designer. ↩︎ Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
