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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
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
A rare and winning combination: a serious person who seldom takes himself seriously. He keeps his ego a little off to the side, muffled, away from the business at hand. It never disappears. It grows dormant, like some cases of tuberculosis. Jules Renard is such a man and writer, an aphorist and wit with the soul of a peasant. Often, he thinks like a farmer â practical, focused, unsentimental â while writing like a satirist. Here is Renard in his Journal, bargaining with fate on October 17, 1899: âOf all that we write, posterity will retain a page, at best. I would prefer to choose the page myself.â Renard writing as a commonsensical critic, September 6, 1902: âA great poet need only employ the traditional forms. We can leave it to lesser poets to worry themselves with making reckless gestures.â  More writerly common sense, November 27, 1895: âKeep their interest! Keep their interest! Art is no excuse for boring people.â  A lesson for âcancel culture, August 1896: âWe always confound the man and the artist, merely because chance has brought them together in the same body. La Fontaine wrote immoral letters to his womenfolk, which does not prevent us from admiring him. It is quite simple: Verlaine had the genius of a god, and the soul of a pig. Those who were close to him must have suffered. It was their own fault! â they made the mistake of being there.â  Renard sounding like the premise of a story by Maupassant, September 29, 1897: âSome men give the impression of having married solely to prevent their wives from marrying other men.â  On why some of us become writers, May 9, 1898: âInspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.â  Renard was born on this date, February 22, in 1864 and died of arteriosclerosis in 1910 at age forty-six. With Montaigne and Proust, he is the French writer I most rely on.  [All quoted passages are from Renardâs Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]
It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also tempting when we find ourselves suddenly impotent, as all artists regularly do, to blame the block on a fickle muse and rue ourselves abandoned by the gods of inspiration. The truth is somewhere in the middle: We are a channel and it does get blocked â it is not an accident that the psychological hallmark of creativity is the âflow stateâ â but while it matters how wide and long the channel is, how muchâŚÂ read article
In the âPrologueâ to his 1962 prose collection The Dyerâs Hand, W.H. Auden borrows a conceit from Lewis Carroll and divides all writers â âexcept the supreme masters who transcend all systems of classificationâ â into Alices and Mabels. In Alice in Wonderland, the title character, pondering her identity, says â. . . Iâm sure I canât be Mabel for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little. Beside sheâs she and Iâm I.â The categorization recalls Sir Isaiah Berlinâs Foxes and Hedgehogs. Of course, all of humanity can also be divided into those who divide all of humanity into two categories and those who donât. Leading the list of Audenâs Alices is Montaigne, followed by the names of eight other writers, including Andrew Marvell, Jane Austen and Paul ValĂŠry. Like Alice, Montaigne knew âall sorts of thingsâ â he is among the most learned of writers -- even while asking âQue sais-je?â: âWhat do I know?â Montaigne begins his longest essay, âApology for Raymond Sebond,â (1576) with these words:  âIn truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. But yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, like Herillus the philosopher, who placed in it the sovereign good, and held that it was in its power to make us wise and content. That I do not believe, nor what others have said, that knowledge is the mother of all virtue, and that all vice is produced by ignorance. If that is true, it is subject to a long interpretation.â  Montaigne distills skepticism, which isnât the same as nihilism or know-it-all-ism. Itâs closer to the absence of naivetĂŠ, credulity and mental laziness, coupled with an open mind and curiosity. Montaigne was a benign skeptic and a Roman Catholic who lived through the French Wars of Religion. Auden wrote âMontaigneâ in 1940, the year France fell to the Germans.  âOutside his library window he could see A gentle landscape terrified of grammar, Cities where lisping was compulsory, And provinces where it was death to stammer.  âThe hefty sprawled, too tired to care: it took This donnish undersexed conservative To start a revolution and to give The Flesh its weapons to defeat the Book.  âWhen devils drive the reasonable wild, They strip their adult century so bare, Love must be re-grown from the sensual child,  âTo doubt becomes a way of definition, Even belles lettres legitimate as prayer, And laziness a movement of contrition.â  âDeath to stammerâ is no exaggeration. In the sixteenth century, speech defects were often equated with possession by the devil. The final stanza is a writerâs credo. Auden was born on this day in 1907. He shares a birthday with my youngest son, David, who turns twenty-two today.   [The Montaigne passage is from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]
Five new prompts The post âMuse Circe Reclaims Her Lucreâ appeared first on The American Scholar.
