San Diego Cults
“Cult Classic” by Cora Lee is a terrific article covering several of the local cults San Diego discovered over the years. The Yellow Deli in particular is niche restaurant/cultural establishment. And being from San Diego and working the web for a long time I got plenty of references to the Heaven’s Gate suicides.
Not sure what else there is to say but I’ve reread the piece twice and it’s great.
Quote of the Day
From the Illinois State of the State address today. I’ve added a transcript to the ol’ Smorgasborg.
I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution of the State of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor …. according to the best of my ability.”
My oath is to the Constitution of our State and of our Country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one.
I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations. If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:
It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.
Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their March in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter-protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.
Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.
Thank you.
Two, on social media, each gated.
Frostine Shake: Social Media vs. Your Creativity (in a private post accessible if you sub to her newsletter):
As algorithms continue to feed our every thought. I think it’s important to protect your brain and protect your creativity. So how do you do that? How do you protect yourself and your creativity on and off online? In my opinion, I think it starts with a healthy balance of both online and offline activities. You can both exist on social media, but also not allow it to dictate how or when you create things. Last year I really pushed myself to only shoot on film no matter how many rolls of film didn’t turn out conventionally “good”. I’ll create things whether anyone sees them or not. it’s special to have artwork or photos that are just for yourself, no peering eyes, no stealing, no judgement, just you and the act of creating something with any result, even if no one sees it.
Molly Crabapple: The Infernal Machine. I suspect I would love this post. Crabapple created Dr. Sketchy’s which I have been a fan of for years and miss very much. But the Substack paid gateway has stopped me. I saw the promise of getting a free post but unfortunately I’m a loop of trying to download the app to “Claim my free post.” I’m hoping that this post eventually shows up on her excellent website mollycrabapple.com.
I think sorting out how creators can create good social media alternatives is important. And I think newsletters will be an important part of that mix. It is frustrating to see software impediments making this more difficult.
Forever is the wind
Just thinking about some Roky Erickson today:
“The moon to the left of me is a part of my thoughts; is a part of me; is me / Forever is the wind to the left of me is a part of my thoughts; is a part of me; is me”
I spent a pile of time reading some old entries to the August 2023 IndieWeb Carnival. It was very satisfying to languidly experience a moment in time from disparate points of view from across the planet.
And this month’s Carnival is going strong, here in our tense present’s present tense.
“I don’t want my fangs too long”
Who then, does?
Unrelated to that
I am an SVG element:
So sayeth James’ excellent HTML Element Quiz. He cited me for some CSS guidance.
Rolling like Summer.
Experimenting with new pages
I’ve been toying with a lighter weight solution to one-off pages.
Lighter weight in this instance means “not inside WordPress.”
To that end, here are some new pages:
A Projects Page which talks about some of the things I created and work on regularly.
A Prior Projects Page which is a place for me to talk about prior experiences.
Both are necessarily incomplete. I’ve been doing stuff and making stuff a long time.
And tonight I’ve finally put in some work posting videos of myself bodysurfing. I was incredibly frustrated by the lack of avif support inside WordPress. It turned out not to have been WordPress, but PHP that’s the problem. My site is not ready for a full upgrade to PHP 8, but it’s in progress. AVIF support was added in 8.
And so, here’s a page, or at least the start of a page, showing off brief rides in video.
I had huge mp4 files. At least 10MB each. I was able to use tools to convert these to animated avif files. And further, create jpeg representations of them as well.
Incantations like: ffmpeg -i $mp4_file -r 8 -vf scale=200:-1 $avif_file and ffmpeg -i $avif_file -vf scale=200:-1 $jpeg_file are … intriguing. It’s great to be using tools to automate running such things in bulk rather than having to do each one one at a time.
But I’ve also found changing files of large size rapidly tends to make my CDN unhappy, which means a lot of “clear CDN cache” hokey pokey which is a bit tedious. I have referred to my disdain for video before, and putting the code entirely under my own programming feels better. Learning! It’s… good.
I also will comment on the videos themselves. I capture the videos using Surfline, found via Dawn Patrol and then use Procreate Dreams to add the overlay to highlight myself in the rides.
I’ve also updated my Headers Archive, again. Using the same framework that these other pages are created with:
Lastly: the first page I made using the framework, a mirror of my IndieWeb profile page at /indieweb/
I also removed several more WordPress plugins and replaced their behavior with different mechanisms. I still have some pages to remove from WordPress, for simplicity’s sake. But that change means I also have work to do with regards to making onsite site search work.
WordPress handles search, so any non-WordPress pages aren’t in there. I need to find a solution for that. It’ll need to be an index process to go with a deployment process. I suspect that lives in a Plugin for WordPress that augments search. Or, to create a new search index that can be augmented by WordPress results.
And so… progress!
Tomorrow this blog will be 24 years old. It’s still a reason to learn, to explore, and to create.
I dig it.
Fog
Foggy morning at Pacific Beach by the pier. An hour later it was sunny. Probably the kind of conditions that would confuse Punxsutawney Phil.
I love American Music
Today, please listen to The Cleverlys cover Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” with soupçons of Thrift Shop (Macklemore) and finishing with High on the Mountain by Ola Belle Reed.
American music is best when it loves all American music.
