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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
One of the most important things to have learned in life is that choosing joy in a world rife with reasons for despair is a countercultural act of courage and resistance, choosing it not despite the abounding sorrow we barely survive but because of it, because joy â like music, like love â is one of those entirely unnecessary miracles of consciousness that give meaning to survival with its bright allegiance to the most alive part of us. âWeâve all had too much sorrow â now is the time for joy,â Nick Cave sings in one of my favorite songs,âŚÂ read article
Spoken by a man after my own heart:Â âYou must grant me a dispensation for saying any thing, whether it be sense or nonsense, upon the subject of politics. It is truly a matter in which I am so little interested, that, were it not that it sometimes serves me for a theme when I can find no other, I should never mention it.â Â Iâve come to think of politics as no more than a pretext people use for getting angry. They enjoy the illusion of self-righteous power it gives them. Itâs a handy stand-in for religion, sports, musical tastes, anything enabling that rush of disapproving emotion and self-aggrandizement. A reader asksâneutrally, I thinkâfor my assessment of President Trumpâs second administration thus far. Because I donât pay much attention to such things, my judgment is worthless, a waste of time. Iâve never defined myself with such categories and I donât think my opinions are of any importance simply because they are mine. The author of the credo above is the English poet William Cowper, writing to his friend the Rev. John Newton on July 5, 1784. He continues: Â âI would forfeit a large sum, if, after advertising a month in the Gazette, the minister of the day, whoever he may be, could discover a man who cares about him or his measures so little as I do. When I say that I would forfeit a large sum, I mean to have it understood that I would forfeit such a sum if I had it.â Â Cowper is the poet of spectatorship, of diffidence expressed as a willingness to observe the world, not plunge into its swelter. He was a high-strung man, affectionate and loyal to his friends but haunted by depression and suicidal thoughts. His sense of humor was subtle and often heavily disguised. He barely recognized civic affairs and remained blithely immune to politics. His passions were poetry and religion, not meddling. Like me, I think he understood the role of government to be filling potholes and arresting bad guys, or the comparable obligations of his day. Iâm reminded of Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Workers. Asked by a reporter why she didnât vote, Day is supposed to have answered: âBecause it only encourages themâ
The poem that became a hymn to the nation came about in troubled, polarizing times The post America the Beautiful appeared first on The American Scholar.
âIn spite of the Deconstructionists who say that communication is not really possible, we most of us manage to honor stop signs, and we all honor the dollar sign, whether or not we are willing to admit it.â In 1995, R.L. Barth published The Golden Calf: Poems of Money, edited by the poet Turner Cassity and Mary Ellen Templeton, a fellow librarian of Cassityâs in the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta. The subject is a rare one among poets â so crass, after all, and so bourgeois. Contrast that absence with the ubiquity of the quest for wealth in the novels of the nineteenth century, from Balzac to Henry James and beyond. Even crime novels, whether pulpy or sophisticated, are frequently driven by the desire for loot. The editors have found moolah poems by thirty-three American and English poets writing between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, without including Ezra Poundâs crackpot ravings in the Cantos.  The statement at the top is drawn from Cassityâs introduction. As ever, his tone is arch, erudite, almost campy and very amusing. â[W]hile it has been easy to find poems about begging, borrowing, and stealing, as well as gambling and privateering,â he writes, âit has been very difficult to find poems about simply earning or making money.â  Many of us spend half our lives earning money, and yet few poets show much interest in the subject. âHuman envy being what it is,â Cassity writes, âErato and Mammon will probably never lie down together in any degree of comfort, but no topics as central as avarice and ambition can fail to engage a really serious writer, as the Renaissance, the 17th, and the 18th centuries were well aware.â Several of the poets and poems in C&Tâs anthology are new to this reader. Take âWorldly Wealthâ by the Welsh poet Rowland Watkyns (1616?-64), with the subtitle âNatura paucis contentaâ (âNature is satisfied with littleâ):  âWealth unto every man, I see, Is like the bark unto the tree: Take from the tree the bark away, The naked tree will soon decay. Lord, make me not too rich. Nor make me poor, To wait at rich mensâ tables, or their door.â  Given that money is often a pretext for comedy, some of the collected poems qualify as light verse. Take Ebenezer Elliottâs (1781-1849) âOn Communists,â written while Karl Marx, who never held down a regular job and lived off the largesse of Friedrich Engels, was still alive:  âWhat is a Communist? One who has yearnings For equal division of unequal earnings; Idler or bungler, or both, he is willing To fork out his penny and pocket your shilling.â  Here youâll find well-known names too: George Herbert, Jonathan Swift, Herman Melville, Rudyard Kipling and E.A. Robinson. Here is another poem by yet another non-job-holder, though not a sponger like Marx, Emily Dickinson:  âBecause âtwas Riches I could own, Myself had earned it -- Me, I knew the Dollars by their names -- It feels like Poverty  âAn Earldom out of sight to hold, An Income in the Air, Possession -- has a sweeter chink Unto a Miser's Ear.â  Cassity provides an âAfterword,â his poem âA Dance Part Way Around the Veau dâOr, or, Rich Within the Dreams of Avarice.â It appears not to be available online but you can find it in Hurricane Lamp (1986) and The Destructive Element: New and Selected Poems (1998).
Notes from a musical tour of South Africa The post Lessons in the Diplomatic Arts appeared first on The American Scholar.
