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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 post Big Rock, High Plateau appeared first on The American Scholar.
News of certain public deaths remains rooted in memory to an indelible time and place. Famously, millions of mundane lives intersected forever with the assassination of President Kennedy, which people recall in vivid detail more than sixty years later their reactions at that moment. While working on the city desks of several newspapers I learned that Glenn Gould, R. Buckminster Fuller, Sam Peckinpah and Zoot Sims had died. The news was carried by the wire. On a humid evening in Youngstown, Ohio, while riding around the city, I learned from the radio the unlikely news that Vladimir Nabokov had died--one of those deaths that leaves you numb and unbelieving. It was July 2, 1977, and the Russian-born American novelist was seventy-eight. I had been reading him for a decade and the notion that he might someday die had never occurred to me. Nabokov writes in Speak, Memory: Â âWhenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then--not in dreams--but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.â Â I feel fortunate that my life overlapped with Nabokovâs, that I read his work early while his Russian books were being translated into English, that they took up residence in my imagination and that I return to his books regularly, with certainty of delight. I often measure other writers against the excellence of his achievement. His example confirms that themes of mortal significance in fiction can be composed in prose that John Updike once described as âecstatic.â Iâve just finished rereading The Defense (1930; trans. by the author and Michael Scammell, 1964), where the imagery of vision and mist recur yet again: Â âAny future is unknownâbut sometimes it acquires a particular fogginess, as if some other force had come to the aid of destiny's natural reticence and distributed this resilient fog, from which thought rebounds.â
âOne must be a seer, make oneself a seer,â Arthur Rimbaud wrote, âby a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.â As more and more of our senses are being amputated by the blade of our image-centric culture, reducing the vast and delicate sensorium of human experience â moss on a rock, a salty summer evening at the oceanâs edge, a loverâs kiss â to a purely visual representation on a two-dimensional screen, it matters all the more that we train our vision to see beyond the veneer of the visible. It is hardly surprising, given the co-evolutionâŚÂ read article
The Pod Generationâs near-future satire pits nature against technology. Which is the better curator?
In my family we canât get away from the âYâ chromosome. Having children is known as âgoing to the Y.â I have three sons, no daughters, and my brother, who died last summer, was my sole sibling. My mother had five brothers, no sisters. My father, two brothers, no sisters, etc. Little girls and by extension, women, remain mysteries to me, even more so than they are to most men. I envy my friends with daughters, though Iâm not complaining. My sons are healthy, smart, seldom boring, often funny and have never been arrested. Today is Michaelâs twenty-fifth birthday. He is my middle son, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, a cyber officer stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland. He is a walking balance of left and right brain. His interests include mathematics, etymology, history, rock climbing and literature. We can keep up with most of each otherâs conversations. About Michael I have few worries and no regrets. Talking with other parents, I know how fortunate I am.  Dr. Johnson had no children of his own but was devoted to his stepdaughter, Lucy Porter, the daughter of Johnsonâs wife, Elizabeth Jervis Porter Johnson (1689-1752), known as Tetty. Lucy was born in 1715, six years after Johnson, lived in Lichfield with his mother and served in her shop. She died in 1786, two years after her stepfather. Johnson had always assumed a fond, fatherly role with Lucy, who became one of his most frequent correspondents. For this most stoical of men, the death of loved ones was always shattering. In his 1974 biography of Johnson, John Wain notes his emotional state after his motherâs death in January 1759:  âHis letters to Lucy Porter are pitiful; he leans on her, begs for her help and comfort, asks that she shall stay on in the house and let the little business go on as it can, and is content to leave all the details to her and take her word for everything. âYou will forgive me if I am not yet so composed as to give any directions about anything. But you are wiser and better than I and I shall be pleased with all that you shall do.ââ  Lucy was his close contemporary, a mature woman, which is not the same as raising a child from birth. The love is real but less blood-deep. Johnson suggests this in his Rambler essay from November 13, 1750:  "It may be doubted, whether the pleasure of seeing children ripening into strength be not overbalanced by the pain of seeing some fall in the blossom, and others blasted in their growth; some shaken down by storms, some tainted with cankers, and some shriveled in the shade; and whether he that extends his care beyond himself does not multiply his anxieties more than his pleasures, and weary himself to no purpose, by superintending what he cannot regulate."  Johnsonson intuitively understood a parentâs vulnerabilities and limits. Michael has never fallen, been blasted, shaken, tainted or shriveled. Still, one worries, quietly.
