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January 2024 Fifty-nine posts
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Swimming Summaries: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024
Why did I get back into swimming so enthusiastically?
spite swimming | sanity swimming (2022 – 2023) -
My Soundtrack for Bodysurfing
My friend Susan recently asked me this question:
Is there a piece of music that captures what bodysurfing feels like?
Here’s how I answered, in pieces:
This is an intriguing question. I don’t really have an answer but I will pop the cap on my brain and share songs that recur when I’m in the water. When the current is strong I will keep time against it with Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang.” And when the waves are closing out the refrain of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” by Bruce Springsteen comes into my head. And this is even weirder: when it’s a good session some phrases from “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” will come into my head and I’ll even start sing-saying them to myself.
Speaking of which every year, I start a new playlist and as I encounter or think of songs I add them. This is 2023’s: 2023 fee fie phō fun… which has on it a cover of “A Day in the Life” — and I first heard it in a surf video and it seems like the closest maybe? But it’s also got a lot going on as one of the “opus” Beatle songs.
Follow up: Kelly and I watched “Nyad” on Netflix, famous long distance swimmer and it mentions how she kept 4/4 time songs in her mind to keep her strokes consistent. Also how do we get more movies with Annette Bening and Jodie Foster giving each other shit because that was good.
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Make Mine Indieweb!
I just read that 2024: Year of the Personal Website and it feels like a call to arms. People deserve the dignity of understanding that what they write and create will be available to those who want to read it. This is part of why I’ve embraced the #indieweb.
A quote from Matthias Ott:
And there are still so many sites to be built and blog posts to be written and published. So, how about we make 2024 the year of the personal website again?
I say: YES.
Also loving to see that folks with a larger profile are spreading the word to the masses. Anil Dash‘s piece in Rolling Stone The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again notes that:
But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent.
Anil’s piece is broader in scope than personal websites but rings true for a moment where people have things to say and feel constrained by the limits of the stacks which make it more difficult than seems reasonable to simply let me see and read the posts from people I chose to follow. When folks talk about shadowbans, or have posts removed, or feel the need to speak in code, those are signs that the private silos like Facebook (including Instagram and Threads), Twitter and others are not doing right by us. Mastodon is better. Bluesky is newer but is still scaling up and I suspect will hit the point where it will feel the need to behave similarly.
The web–the personal web–gets around that.
Make Mine Indieweb!
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New Bot Day! Welcome Tracerbot! Made by @mukikim_toys it can follow a thick marker line and was a terrific Christmas gift from @hellokellykuhl! It’s for ages 5 and up so I qualify. Gwen is suspicious though. Happy New Year!
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Goodbye Clash of Clans
In Summer 2014 I started playing the quite engaging iOS game Clash of Clans.I mentioned it at the end of 2014. And I mentioned it in 2022, too–with screenshots.
I stopped playing regularly a few months ago. I look periodically but I’ve lost the habit. Probably I’ve replaced it with CSS Battle. Which is great.
Here’s how my main base looks right now.
Time to go!
Bye Bye Clash of Clans!
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Miscellaneous Brain Dump!
The New Year is a good time to do a brain dump and clean up. Put away decorations. Clean things up. Empty the various stacks in my brain.
I mentioned yesterday how much I love CSS Battle. Some of the targets are really tricky. Their logo has befuddled me for quite a while and I just threw up my hands. This morning I returned to it and managed to get 100%, which, once I get to a 100% my mind is far more settled.
I made a new header today. That was fun. Heavy use of CSS gradients.
In the midst of a great conversation about LLMs I mentioned to my friend Al that Macs have a built in text summarizer, and have for years.
It’s still there, but hidden by default. It’s in the “Services” context menu.
To get it you have to open System Settings and go 5 levels deep in the menus at the very bottom.
System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts... → Services → Text --> Summarize
Then in the Services menu in any app you can get at the Summarizer dialogue:
How does etherpad choose the editor color?
You can click the color when you’re logged in and set the color!
After I made my header I wanted to make a thumbnail for it, and for many years I used webkit2png to create those. Initially I used a command like:
python ~/bin/webkit2png -C --clipheight=400 --clipwidth=1000 https://artlung.com/headers/{$filename}
Where filename is the path of the header. That stopped working at some point because the tool was dependent on interacting with lower level MacOS APIs that broke. The last command that worked looked like:
/usr/local/Cellar/webkit2png/0.7/bin/webkit2png --ignore-ssl-check -C --clipheight=75 --clipwidth=200 https://artlung.com/headers/{$filename}
I tested a new tool related to wkhtmltopdf is called
wkhtmltoimage
which I can call usingwkhtmltoimage https://artlung.com/headers/header-20240103.php wkhtmltoimageoutoput.jpg
I tried this on my new header and the result, while functional at least, lacks the CSS background.
I don’t know if this is by design that it drops backgrounds but playing with the settings did not help.
I recently re-read about
/now
pages, well-documented in the indieweb wiki: Now pages, described on now now now dot com. Look for that, I think, in the future.
Last week I had a notion to make some CSS animated “waves” – inspired possibly by It’s A Small World and similar presentations. It’s really fun to be able to use the various kinds of CSS gradient to turn a rough idea into something that approaches what I imagined.
gRegor shared a post of his from 2013 that I found charming: Don’t Multitask With Fire, which I really like.
Thanks Indieweb Pacific Homebrew Website Club for helping inspire this post!
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Today is January 4th
I ended the day yesterday putting away Christmas decorations. Included in those are my two favorite ornaments. One by my friend Chris Greazel and one by my ex-spouse Leoh Blooms.
Chris painted this ornament in 1989 and somehow survived every move I’ve made for 30+ years. That little yellow Corvette has had staying power!
And Leoh’s is terrific, made in felt and honoring the Robot Girl by Michelle Valigura from my robot collection.
I started the day taking out the recycling and mailing some thank you cards. It was good.
Yesterday the ocean was a maelstrom of unrideability. It was windy starting early so I didn’t get out there. Today, checking Surfline, I like the human-written prediction for the day.
Expect water temps to be down a few degrees from yesterday after some acute upwelling. Surf eases through the afternoon but stays fun. Wind swirls around onshore from the SW through the day but looks to stay relatively light. Don’t expect it to be the cleanest day of waves but there should be plenty of opportunity to get a surf or two in.
Schaler Perry wrote that. I appreciate the Surfline folks, I suspect it’s a pretty hard and mostly thankless job. You don’t need the weatherman to know which way the wind blows some entertainer once crooned, but I appreciate surf reports and surf cameras.
Also this morning I updated some of my headers to more modern HTML+CSS. It’s fun to read the difference between how I wrote HTML then versus now. Tables and spacer gifs were the only real viable choice. These days those CSS gradients help immensely.
I’ll try to hit the beach and I have some other errands to do today. It might just be a good day.
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It’s January 5th. Good morning.
For a while I was making montages using ImageMagick’s actual
montage
command.For example:
montage 1.jpg 2.jpg 3.jpg 4.jpg 5.jpg 6.jpg 7.jpg 8.jpg 9.jpg 10.jpg 11.jpg 12.jpg 13.jpg 14.jpg 15.jpg 16.jpg -tile 4x4 -geometry 800x800+0+0 -background black montage.jpg
Recently I have wanted want to customize the appearance of these so I tend to write one-off scripts. I’d put them online but they really are super specific to my own uses and I like to tweak the final size so the result is somewhat messy PHP.
Yesterday I started my new annual (Spotify) playlist. The criteria for inclusion on my annual playlist is if I hear it or I like it I add it. And I keep to it all year. And once the year ends, that closes it out. I don’t mind carrying over songs year to year. Where do I hear new music? It might be on Radio Garden. It might be music in a film – Bring the Lucie from Children of Men and Benson, Arizona from Dark Star stand out there. Or it might be from a YouTube video. Or someone mentions in conversation or social media an artist or genre. I will then go looking for that and try songs related. Same album, same year, whatever. There are times I add something and it doesn’t stay on the list. The list has to be something I want to listen to again. One year I added Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” to a playlist once and it got irritating on repeated listening. So I dropped it. Regardless, as Frank Zappa said: “Music is the best.”
I first included the word “pho” in an annual playlist in 2016 and I have been doing that since then. I HAVE NO IDEA WHY I DID THAT. NO RECOLLECTION. Whimsy, maybe.
Yesterday, after 4 days I made a cover image for this year’s playlist:
Of course Hong Kong Phooey’s copyright belongs to Hanna Barbera. Also Scatman Crothers has always been a favorite of mine.
This year’s playlist is called “2024 Pho Phooey”:
And now, a list of my playlists since 2016, in reverse order. Just the ones with “pho” in their name.
- 2023 fee fie phō fun
- 2022 phō deux too
- 2021 faux pho foe
- 2020 me-pho-me
- 2019 phø phø fo no fanana bana bo no
- 2018 phō kay peoples
- 2017 pho is new again🍜
- 2016 pho ‘realidad
Yesterday and this morning I made updates to the Headers from the past to make them a bit more modern and scale slightly better. I’m mostly pleased. It’s a great use for Codepen to work on these one-offs. It’s fun to minimize the HTML markup. I’ve been mulling a mechanism to embed them in blog posts. But it seems unnecessary since I can link to them.
It’s a bit colder today I think.
Soon I’ll go the beach. Perhaps after some nutrition.
Onward.
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Incredible sandcastle. And I found the largest shell I’ve ever found on a beach. So. Mission.
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“You can do anything with HTML and CSS” on memory, code, and a belated birthday wish
It’s Saturday.
Today some of the family I have locally and I will visit the grave of my maternal great grandmother.
I never met her. I am looking forward to hearing about her on a day we’ve dedicated to her at her final resting place. I’ve conspired with my cousin to put this gathering together and I hope it goes well.
There are two people who I was under the impression were alive when I was born. And I was wrong.
The first person I thought was alive was Walt Disney. I watched him on Sunday nights! It seems like he was the host of “The Wonderful World of Disney” during my childhood. [more]. I believe this impression stayed with me until my 30s. I never looked it up. I know he died. But when? When I finally looked it up on the internet I learned he died in December 1966. That date is before I was born.
Memory is malleable. Memory is suggestible. Memory is unreliable. But memory is beautiful too. We hold memory dear.
Hm.
The second person I thought was alive was my grandma’s mom. My great-grandmother. My aunts and uncles and mom loved her. My parents described taking her to a movie once. They told me about her. I thought I was too young to remember her.
I saw photos of her from when my parents were dating. She must’ve been in a memory from infancy I didn’t retain.
I imagined her holding me when I was an infant. There was some photo of her holding a baby with a white fluffy blanket. I imagined how soft that was.
But alas, that was not a real memory.
I hope to get to know her better today by getting my family to share more about her.
Yesterday I did some more reworks on my old headers. My facility with CSS backgrounds and the interactions between
background-image
,background-size
,background-repeat
,background-position
are really intricate. I realize now that I’ve been thinking in terms of HTML elements for every particular part of a design. I suspect I could’ve been implementing many of these optimizations for years, but didn’t. I particularly enjoy exploring what I can do with the gradients. But then, I’ve mentioned this before.HTML and CSS are amazing.
I am reminded of the quote from Harvey Pekar:
Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.
Speaking of which, in February 2021 I tweeted about the movie about Harvey:
Best comic book movie remains American Splendor.
Here’s a song from that film, called American Splendor by Eytan Mirsky.
I find sad lyrics like this really inspirational. I know they read as depressing. I know they make me cry. But they are beautiful.
I’m no hero, just a guy…
Who was born to live, suffer and die
I’m a man, just like you,
But I’ll shout at the top of my voice
‘til my point gets throughI thought that life was one long struggle,
It looks like i was right
I know i’ll never win this war, but
I won’t give up without a fight, andWhere is my American Splendor?
In a world that’s cloudy and gray
Where life keeps passing by me
Day by day?The distance between American Splendor and Lawrence’s Don’t Lose Sight is short.
This shit’s gonna kill me
But I won’t let it
And I try to give ’em hell
But they don’t get it
So I tell myself when I sleep at night
Don’t lose sight
Baby don’t lose sight
And they try to give me up
But I won’t give in
And this life will get you down
But I keep living
So I tell myself when I sleep at night
Don’t lose sight
Baby don’t lose sightDon’t lose sight. It may be that the world’s badness is insurmountable. And that the powers arrayed against us, against doing right and doing good are huge. But we keep on. I won’t give up without a fight. Harvey didn’t.
You can do anything with words and pictures.
Pekar is one of the people I think of as I create comics.
I have a number in various untidy unfinished states.
But I also have made a few. Including some that I’m proud of and that were published.
Comics are words and pictures. I say that the web is HTML and CSS. And you can do anything with HTML and CSS.
(Code for those concentric circles looks like:
<div style="margin: auto;height: 244px;width: 456px;background-image:repeating-radial-gradient(circle at 50% 50%, #222, #222 10px, #fff 10px, #fff 20px);border: 1px solid #222;"></div>
, but there are probably other ways to accomplish that as well. SVG. PNG. JavaScript & acanvas
tag. A bunch of elements withaspect-ratio: 1
andborder-radius: 50%
)You can do anything with HTML and CSS.
Facebook is just HTML and CSS.
I have been doing web pages for a long time and saw the empires of AltaVista and MySpace and America Online and Compuserve and Netscape rise to dominance and then fall and so anything that I post on any service I don’t trust will exist forever.
But Facebook is just HTML and CSS. It can be replaced by our own thing.
Which brings me to reading the morning news via RSS. I’ve not done that in a few days, and I see from gRegor’s Braindump 2024 that I missed his birthday. Happy Belated Birthday Friend! My appreciation for all things #indieweb has been enriched because I know gRegor.
And he cares about health and safety. Part of the recent IWC2023 was that it was outdoors, and still, one participant caught COVID. Now that person probably did not get it at our camp, nobody else tested positive and got sick. But still, we need caution. I appreciate that gRegor is working on safety pledge language.
…I won’t give up without a fight…
Excellent stuff.
Okay, I now feel the itch to finish this up and go to the beach.
I’ll leave you with some small–literally
<small>
–calls to action:check out indieweb dot org
check out gRegor Love dot com
read some of my comics
go learn to make web pages
go learn about Harvey PekarDon’t lose sight, baby don’t lose sight…
Aw shucks, I’m enjoying reading RSS and just stumbled on James’ The Web Is Yours and it’s thematically related to what I wrote today. It’s in the wind. The web is yours. And it’s just HTML and CSS.
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Nobody out. Then some surfers came out and got helped out of the water by lifeguards. I caught zero waves. Excellent rough water swim against huge closeouts.
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Modernizing 2004 web design to 2024
I’ve been having a blast with updating all of my blog headers.
CSS Battle continues to influence my thinking about how things look.
How little code can I use to accomplish a result? Code Golf? There’s an old tv show called Name That Tune and contestants would “bid” on how many notes of a song they would need to identify a song by name. “I can name that tune in 5 notes!”
I have avoided updating these old designs because of a bad idea. The bad idea was they were permanent and immutable. They mustn’t be changed. To update them would be to misrepresent what they were. Antiques! Precious archival materials.
They’re not antiques.
They represent an intention from the time. They were my idea of the time to convey tone and mood and my life at the time. It’s not their code that is important. What is important is the idea.
They deserve to be seen and do what they were intended to do.
Or, at least, I want them to convey what I meant at the time.
People aren’t looking at them in Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0.
And so, the peculiar way I relied on
cellspacing
,cellpadding
,vspace
,space
, and blank GIFs no longer applies. They now render in ways totally unrelated to the design intent. This is the nature of digital creation.For example, here’s one from 2004 which features a pair of shoes which I wore the heck out of. Doc Martens. I was broke. And so I wore them and wore them until they failed.
Originally I had that as a table with 6 cells over, 4 rows. With the first rows using the
bgcolor
attribute to get a color. It was the best choice in 2004 but not where I live now, 2024.Moreover, when I scaled the browser width narrower it became a jumbled mess. Optimizing for 640 pixels wide or 800 pixels makes no sense now. It never made much sense anyway, as the future would always bring bigger screens, but here in 2024 the “pixels” we use are sort of a weird compromise around how things work. And I can use a CSS
border
to represent those top and bottom bars rather than a table cell with acolspan
of 3 and a weird width of100%
.In the new version I also made decisions about how the thing would scale, changing the images of the text to be transparent, and including some elliptical gradients behind them so that they look nicer.
You can resize your browser (if you can resize your browser!) to see the result, or see a representative scaling change below:
I’ve been using CodePen for this.
Here’s another interesting one, with bold color and a more complicated design:
And to look back at differently political time:
Something slightly patriotic for September 2001.
I’ve collected these into one CodePen Collection there: ArtLung Blog Headers (2000-2024).
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Water colder because of an upwelling. The cone I can’t explain.
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Misc; Writing HTML onto Paper
This morning I’m listening to Scary Pockets. Covers of pop in a funky style. I enjoy much of it. It veers into what younger me would call “easy listening” which is a red flag. Music must be interesting. They manage to make it funky and fun and danceable. I started listening to Scary Pockets because of the cover of Rodrigo’s “deja vu” they do with Lawrence.
It’s chillier. The sea is chillier. The air is chillier. The atmosphere of the world is chillier. War and horrors continue in Ukraine and Palestine.
Bundle up.
I’ve got more I want to do on this here website, and more I want to do with my headers. That was fun yesterday. It’s also fun to embed a header. Here’s another! It’s from 2001. I still wonder if anyone is reading this.
Yesterday I was looking at Squarespace’s ability to set a focal point on images and image blocks which can resize. Using focal points to center images. I was impressed by the documentation overall with Squarespace. This article on image handling was very helpful to get me up to speed quickly.
Many image areas on your site have a built-in centering feature called the focal point. The focal point sets the focus of an image, giving you control over where the image is centered.
WIX has a similar feature — Wix Pro Gallery: Changing the Focal Point of an Image or Video
I have not experimented with it, but they accomplish this with native HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Using Focal Points, Aspect Ratio & Object-Fit To Crop Images Correctly by Henry Desroches is on my to-read list.
Computers are terrible.
But.
I remain committed to the idea that HTML and CSS are amazing. In that spirit I enjoyed Three decades of HTML–a reminiscence by the eminent Eric Meyer.
I remember my own first experience writing HTML. I wrote it out by hand on the night shift (seven p to seven a) working as a respiratory therapist at a big hospital in downtown Los Angeles.
I had a copy of Laura Lemay’s Teach Yourself Web Publishing With Html 3.2 in 14 Days. Did I get that at Opamp Books in Hollywood? Or Midnight Special Books in Santa Monica? Or Borders across the street from the Beverly Center? I can’t remember. But I didn’t get it on Amazon or eBay.
I would read about tags, and how they would have an effect. About what an
href
attribute was. It seemed like the fact that theimg
tag usedsrc
and nothref
bothered me a bit.I wrote HTML code on the the back of my assignment sheet.
On the front? A list of patients whose ventilators I was helping manage, or on oxygen, or in croup tents maintained by the respiratory therapy department. Printed out at the beginning of the shift on a dot matrix printer by whoever was shift supervisor.
On the back? HTML code I hand wrote in pen, tag by tag. No computer to test on. This was not UVA, no computers for the RTs, really. UVa was very computerized: MEDLINE in the offices with weird terminal interfaces to look up journal articles. We could check standing orders on a computer! But the downtown hospital was mostly paper.
I kept the assignment sheet and took it home and would take it to UCLA Extension or computer-time-rental places Input/Output Center on Sunset Blvd or Kinko’s so I could type it into a computer and see what it did.
It’s a good morning to remember.
So many moments have brought me to where I am this morning.
Onward.
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Thursday
My bodysurfing is improving. My internal monologue when riding waves sometimes results in commentary to myself like “not bad.”
This morning I made some git commits to the blog.
- simplifying markup inside the footer
- altering how the css for the footer works
- adjustments to link page css
- adjustments to search page language
- stop using blog-resultset for individual blog post pages
- new social-links
- css fixes for regressions in shared code
- added a star for webmention likes
- updating math division to use calc() function
- add fix for odd issue where clip-path items appeared over main sticky nav
- add swim2024 to the list of supported fullscreen items
- webmention and comment improvements
- update how the colors class decides on what color to return
- add spotify and bluesky to links page
It’s windy. And a bit rainy. And that’s not my favorite thing.
Curious about the bear on the California flag? The sad saga of the bear said to be depicted on California’s state flag by Mike McPhate. I am a big fan of the bear and the flag.
I took some great nice yesterday.
I attended the IndieWeb Europe Zoom (evening for them, morning for my time zone) yesterday and had a good time. I had the notion that what the world needs a nonprofit Squarespace. Or WIX. Or LiveJournal. Or Tumblr or something. It’s a half-baked idea but perhaps I should try to bake it. If there’s no profit motive for a hosting provider perhaps the pernicious effects of monetization won’t destroy the experience. Of course, creating any hosting platform would require all the work of moderation and decisions about whomever you provide hosting services to and their conduct.
Thanks for reading. Have a great day.
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Hung out with Al & Kelly and @rewildmissionbay / @sd_coastkeeper / @sandiegoaudubon at the Kendall-Frost Marsh during today’s king tide. The deepest tide of the year owing to gravity’s pull and a show of the extremes of water depth that we will see more of as the planet changes. We gotta work on a better world. I hope we can re-wild more of the bay!
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Galactic Notes from The IndieWeb
James was good enough to provide this feedback during this morning’s IndieWeb online meeting:
I see this when subscribing to your homepage microformats feed in Monocle:
I don’t use Monocle but figured immediately what the issue might be, I had prioritized markup for myself generally, and for individual posts, but not for the main page with the main display of posts. IO was able to use the excellent IndieWebify Me tool and update the display.
Thank you James!
The other day Tantek mentioned–in passing–in the indieweb chat on Thursday:
speaking of CSS hackery, can I lazyweb request a CSS version of the famous Sex Pistols album cover wikipedia: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols
And I’ve enjoyed going deep on that task. Here’s the current state of it:
Read more about the design here and here.
It’s been a tremendous learning exercise.
I learned that the font Impact is NOT available and there’s no solid fallback for it on Android devices, thanks to Kevin Marks doing QA on his device. That made me make the decision to use a Google Font: Oswald.
And the history of Impact and of the Core Fonts for the Web which was an effort between 1996 and 2002 to create ubiquitous availability of fonts. Font usage on the web has changed incredibly many times, and font management has also changes many times in all that time. Folks may not remember the days when one could use Flash to replace fonts dynamically: that was called Cufon.
But Oswald is working well, and the other font is Times New Roman, with both fonts tweaked using CSS:
transform
,skew
,rotate
,scaleX
, andscaleY
. It’s “fun” to see how the various mutations have an effect the others. -
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“I’ve got my philosophy (Keeps my feet on the ground)”
I slept in today.
Some days I like to get an early start and hit the beach.
That was my intent today.
That’s not what happened.
Instead I was able to join the Galactic Bonus Homebrew Website Club. A charming name and a charming and friendly gathering of smart people.
We live in a time when disgust with the large social media silos is at a peak. IWC people are making an effort to create and maintain a more personal web presence and spread the word that there’s another way to do the web other than big corporate sites where your writing and videos is more “content” for others to hit like and subscribe on.
I was reminded that when I first started blogging 23 years ago the main constraint on what I wrote here was the notion that eventually my mother would read the site. That vague guideline impacted what I said, and shared, the language I used. And a few years later, I was proven right. She did read things here. It’s very weird to think of her entering my url, and leaving a comment. She’s been dead 13 years. But there are her words, all her exclamation marks on her comment Octobre Surprise are still there.
Great blog today Joe and love your photo!!!!!! 🙂 Take good care of each other and it was great hearing your voice!!!!!!
The site was not for her, but I suspected she would be in my audience. And I wrote partly to account for that. I’m glad I had that as part of my plan. I had a notion of my goals. They changed, evolved. I decided the site was for me. I understood others might see and read it, and that was okay. I did not want a mass audience. Because I created a philosophy for myself I’ve been able to keep up with it.
Today had me thinking of audience, fame and monetization. I thought of Heather today. And how an audience can have an effect on a writer. And how dangerous and toxic it can be.
But maybe the world has gotten better.
It’s possible we’ve learned as a culture since then.
Yes, things are worse, I mean, we are in a sustained toxic political moment of war and political discord. But aside from that.
Dooce was a pioneer in writing about her own experiences with mental health. It was novel 20 years ago to write about even the idea of self-care or seeing a counselor or that we have feelings and are sad or have anxiety.
The excellent post from James a few weeks ago: Taking a break from personal projects: Mental health and coding strikes me as honest and true and positive and that candor is a wonderful sign of the times. It’s okay to talk about real stuff. We needn’t be falsely giving the impression that everything is always fine all the time. We don’t have to hide away doubt and sadness. We can share our truth.
Sometimes we have to sleep in and rest.
gRegor hit me with a shout out today, and he wrote about his own experiences, and feelings in the course of his service-work. About the real value of sharing. It’s of a piece with what’s better in the world—of sharing our feelings and being ourselves.
And on the flip side, it’s also great to think about the fact that it is also a completely legitimate philosophy to choose to be less searchable. Private spaces, anonymity, pseudonymity, safe enclosed spaces. Distinct and private from search engines and trackers and the full-text search that has us click-click-clicking for the very very latest news and thoughts of everyone.
I have had Jo‘s post Search Engine Hostility in a text file among links I’ve been considering linking to and writing about for a few days now. And now’s the time. Some words from it had me shout YES! when I read it. I’ll leave it as the coda for this post:
Talking about a personal website or blog, if it’s the same type as mine, like it’s an investment is like talking about a novel or a painting set or a video game like an investment. Do you see how silly that seems? I don’t get any money out of it. I get enjoyment, I get a hobby, I get community and I get fun. Isn’t that enough? Can we not just accept this as enough?
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Email of the Day: 23andMe
I’m a fan of 23andMe. Which is to say, I appreciated the cost and speed with which they provided data about my own genetic makeup. It meant a lot to me and my family. I wrote about that in my comic which talks about my background.
But it’s no fun to get an email about a data breach, as I did today.
23andMe, Inc. (“23andMe”) takes the privacy and confidentiality of your information very seriously. We are writing to update you regarding an incident involving the personal information you made available through 23andMe’s optional DNA Relatives feature, further described below. Based upon our investigation of this incident, we believe only the profile information that you chose to share through our DNA Relatives feature was involved. There is no evidence that your 23andMe account, or any other information in
your account was accessed in this incident.What information was involved?
Our investigation determined that a threat actor accessed certain information about your ancestry that you chose to share in our DNA Relatives feature, specifically, your DNA Relatives display name, how recently you logged into your account, your relationship labels, and your predicted relationship and percentage DNA shared with the credential stuffed account holder through which your information was accessed. The following information may have also been accessed by the threat actor if you chose to share this information through the DNA Relatives feature: your ancestry reports and matching DNA segments (specifically where on your chromosomes you and your relative had matching DNA),
self-reported location (city/zip code), ancestor birth locations and family names, profile picture, birth year, a weblink to a family tree you created, and anything else you may have included in the “Introduce yourself” section of your profile.What happened?
On October 1, 2023, a third party posted on the unofficial 23andMe subreddit site claiming to have 23andMe customers’ information and posting a sample of the stolen data. Upon learning of the incident, we immediately commenced an investigation and engaged third party incident response experts to assist in determining the extent of any unauthorized activity.Based on our investigation, we believe a threat actor orchestrated a credential stuffing attack during the period from May 2023 through September 2023 to gain access to one or more 23andMe accounts that are connected to you through our optional DNA Relatives feature. Credential stuffing is a method of attack where threat actors use lists of previously compromised user credentials to gain access to another party’s systems. The threat actor accessed those accounts where the usernames and passwords that were used on 23andMe.com were the same as those used on other websites that were previously compromised or otherwise available.
Using this access, the threat actor was able to access information that included certain customers’ DNA Relatives profile information, including yours (collectively, the “DNAR Profile File”). The threat actor then created posts on a website entitled BreachForums that included links to the DNAR Profile File, which may have included your DNA Relatives profile information. These links expired within 24 hours of being made available. We have identified other websites where the DNAR Profile File has been re-posted. 23andMe is taking steps to have the re-posted DNAR Profile File removed from other websites.
What we are doing
When 23andMe became aware of the incident, we immediately began working with third-party security experts to investigate the incident, and we contacted federal law enforcement. On October 10, we required all 23andMe customers to reset their password. On November 6, we required all new and existing customers to login using two-step verification. While we continue our investigation, we have also temporarily paused certain functionality within the 23andMe platform. We are also taking steps to have the re-posted DNAR Profile File removed from other websites.What you can do
For more information about what information is a part of your DNA Relatives profile and how to manage your preferences visit our Customer Care article here. We also recommend you review our
guidance here on how to keep your 23andMe account secure and for additional steps you can take to safeguard your account.For more information
If you have additional questions you may email us at
customercare@23andme.com or call us at 1-800-239-5230 on weekdays from 6am to 5pm PT. You may also write to 23andMe at Attn: Legal, 349 Oyster Point Blvd, South San Francisco, CA 94080.Protecting our customers’ privacy and security continues to be a top priority. We will continue to invest in protecting our systems and data. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused to you by this incident.
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from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/C2GcblcvJ1k/ via IFTTT
Sea lions are camera shy so here’s the pier.
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from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/C2KqwzlLLhw/ via IFTTT
Wavy turban shell (Megastrea undosa). Alternating soaks in a 50% bleach solution and boiling water to remove the outer brown periostracum layer over 2 days. The brown-orange-cream coloring was fully revealed at the end of that process. I found the shell at a beach I’ve been to thousands of times in my life during the super low tide that comes opposite the King Tide. There may be more unseen than seen in our world.
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Where Mickey Mouse is as big as a house (Whoa-oh-oh)
I have less of a reaction about Steamboat Willie coming into the public domain than I thought I would.
Copyright fascinates me though. I remember when I was a teenager writing to the Library of Congress to get their publications–pamphlets really–explaining the process. It was fascinating. It seemed straightforward, and yet also their writing managed to convey the complexities of it all. Learning about those nuances is something I’ve been doing ever since.
And I love the mouse. Here’s two random photos of Mickey interest.
Bruce Sterling’s Speech to the Library Information Technology Association from June 1992, San Francisco is something I reread annually. At the very least.
Can you believe that Melville Dewey once said, “free as air, free as water, free as knowledge?” Free as knowledge? Let’s get real, this is the modern world — air and water no longer come cheap! Hey, you want breathable air, you better pay your air conditioner’s
power-bill, pal. Free as water? Man, if you’ve got sense you buy the bottled variety or pay for an ionic filter on your tap. And free as knowledge? Well, we don’t know what “knowledge” is, but we can get you plenty of data, and as soon as we figure out how to download it straight into student skulls we can put all the teachers into the breadline and the librarians as well.The presumptions that the world is hard and that commercial interests will fight against things like fair use and freedom of speech and clean air and clean water have been ever-present in my life.
But the fatalism of “and there’s nothing that can be done about it”–that’s pernicious. The ever-present avarice and greed of corporate interests has a corollary implication. We The People must be just as ever present to fight those interests. The people have the power in these power dynamics, I don’t care how many yachts and private security guards and cops you have on your side. There’s more of us than there are of the rich.
I had no idea I’d be writing about politics, but apparently thinking about Disney and Copyright has me thinking about politics. I intended my quote of Bow Wow Wow’s Do You Really Want to Hold Me to somehow be apt but that connection is tenuous.
The Democratic Party is not doing all it can to make the world better.
But the Republican Party has been making things worse and continually restates their goals of making everything much, much, much worse. Clean water, why would we need that?–BE AN AMERICAN! WE LIFT OURSELVES UP BY OUR BOOTSTRAPS! QUIT YOUR WHINING AND GET BACK TO WORK.
To which I say a resounding no. I’m not working for the clampdown.
Listen to some Curtis Mayfield. Move on Up
Just move on up
To a greater day
With just a little faith, if you put your mind to it
You can surely do itThere’s no end to struggle. That’s the name of the game.
Curtis Mayfield became a quadriplegic after an injury and kept recording music. He lived 9 years past that catastrophic injury. He’s worth reading about.
Although he was unable to play the guitar, he continued to compose and sing, which he found he could do by lying down and letting gravity pull down on his chest and lungs.
He wasn’t working working for the clampdown.
Kick over the wall
Cause governments to fall–
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour
Anger can be power
D’you know that you can use it?I want more anthems. There are so many good ones. And not nihilism. A punk ethos can be constructive and creative.
And that’s all I have to say this morning, I think.
Onward.
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Deprecations and Exhumations
Spring Cleaning!
Oh, well, maybe it’s winter cleaning?
Winter Cleaning!
I removed the obnoxious google ads from lab.artlung finally. I also removed the site from Google Webmaster tools.
and I did some other clean up of the files. It’s been an experimental space since 1999 but it’s kind of a mess. I’m not really removing things. I mean, cool urls should live forever. But the things I never crowed about I’m removing. It’s a throwback site – static files. Some PHP. Simple.
I updated the Blogging Bot page. Now it provides you with a permalink for whatever Markov Chain based sentence you pull. It uses
pushState
to do things right. You can read more about it on Markov Chains are hilarious..Here’s one, number 5256:I don’t have the energy to be clever here today.
And I found one that’s almost a dril tweet:
And I found this very old old ad for when I was trying to be part of a family business. This effort did not really succeed. Many lessons were learned.
An experiment from 2001 with DHTML: Modify The Box which has a check for Netscape 4
if (document.layers) { }
which thankfully I bet does not exist in any shipping browser any longer.And here’s a little thing to play with a CSS-based-smiley.
And I don’t remember why exactly I thought it was important to post Screenshots of an installation of BlueDragon 7.1 for the Microsoft .NET Framework, but it meant something at the time.
I’ll keep chopping away at it. If it’s a garden, it’s still full of weeds.
I’m not sure how many instances of calling jQuery or other libraries with
http
rather thanhttps
I replaced.I think I’ll probably put up things which I’ve put in CodePen here.
It’s nice to have this space back for myself.
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Google Results Worse
Nothing quite like using Google News search to look at the results for “google results worse.”
I sometmes switch to DuckDuckGo, or more rarely, Bing, but the muscle memory is using Google.
I don’t think I ever have gotten truly more useful results than when I used AltaVista. It was such a raw text search, and maybe the web was small enough then, that as I slightly adjusted my search string I could feel the results getting better. As I narrowed down for an answer to what I was trying to find out I could see the results get better.
The power of the web is amazing. But sifting through it is a large-sized, but well understood problem. But there’s more and more of the web coming online that seems to be word salad or composed in various manners by machines with all parties incentivized to monetize every bit of every website. Money-making and high quality information, weirdly, are not necessarily highly correlated.
In middle school–or was it high school–they told us to stop using encyclopedias as research paper resource material. They had us instead seek more primary sources. Maybe let’s do that.
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Chaos, Mr. Who.
“Chaos, Mr. Who,” Lupus Yonderboy said. “That is our mode and modus. That is our central kick. Your woman knows. We deal with her. Not with you, Mr. Who.” His suit had taken on a weird angular pattern of beige and pale avocado. “She needed her medical team. She’s with them. We’ll watch out for her. Everything’s fine.” He smiled again.
Neuromancer, William Gibson, 1984.
I think about chaos and entropy often. The world, you, me, the Universe, are all hurtling toward less coherent organization. Eventually we become dust, but the systems which regular our homeostasis–stability–eventually break down. Our bones get weaker. We get a cancer. The hinge on the door wears out and the door doesn’t close right anymore.
“Things fall apart” is an aphorism from a poem.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.The Second Coming, W. B. Yeats, 1919.
Humans must do work to oppose entropy. We make up the bed linens of our beds in the morning if we are lucky enough to have a bed to sleep in because sleeping dirties the sheets. Our bodies slough off skin cells and oils. The dirt is imperceptible, mostly. So why make our beds? But if we leave the sheets in place long enough we will notice the entropy encroaches.
Yesterday I read the sad story of Ello, ably documented by Andy Baio in The Quiet Death of Ello’s Big Dreams. Ello had promise, though when I got my account and announced it on Twitter I quipped, darkly:
I’m on Ello. Will it be the next Friendster, MySpace, or Orkut?
https://ello.co/artlung
I’ve worked on the web and used the web long enough to see how hard it is to maintain a service. It costs money and time and effort to run servers. Part of my bleak outlook is partly that I’ve been guilty of such shutdowns. I created San Diego Bloggers and San Diego Blog and WebSanDiego which had fine runs of usefulness and meant something to their audiences. But when I moved away from San Diego I took a payday–selling the domains and sites–and those sites are gone.
On the #indieweb, site deaths are chronicled — that’s entropy.
I worked in ICUs for several years as an RT.
The above is a stylized graphic of a Siemens Servo 900c Mechanical Ventilator. From an operator’s manual.
The Servo 900c came out in 1981. Great machine. I worked with them, among others. If you’d like to look at old mechanical ventilators you can on the AARC dot org, where there’s a museum of mechanical ventilators. I enjoyed the work. I enjoyed helping patients and maintaining equipment. System checks, doublechecking everything: pressure gauges, watching the patient’s chest rise and fall and watching how that related to the system settings. Humidity, oxygen, pressure, peak pressure, volumes, temperature. Everything that could go wrong must be accounted and doublechecked constantly. “Murphy’s Law” says “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” To counteract that, constancy is the job requirement.
So when I encounter any new thing. A technology. An idea. A guild. I implicitly make a decision about how much trust I give it. Will it work when times get tough? Will it always, always, always assure that patient needs come first? It is slightly bizarre for me to think of a place to share words and pictures like a mechanical ventilator, but I do.
I mean, words and pictures–communication–are as essential as breath. Will I trust a that new thing faithfully deliver breath of life?
I think Ello failed because it depended on financing. And the financiers expected Ello to make a certain amount of money. Ello was a machine. And that machine either could deliver on the requirement or not. Whatever sugared words the founders had about making a better web, they failed to account for the demands of their investors. And their investors did not at hear share the vision of that”better way.” Much of my own interest in the indieweb is driven by my mistrust in any particular company to keep their websites going. The site deaths page is updated regularly, supporting my distrust.
Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free. And whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my profession, as well as outside my profession in my intercourse with men, if it be what should not be published abroad, I will never divulge, holding such things to be holy secrets.
Now if I carry out this oath, and break it not, may I gain for ever reputation among all men for my life and for my art; but if I break it and forswear myself, may the opposite befall me.
from a translation of the original Hippocratic oath
Google at one time took the oath “Don’t be evil.” This morning I read Tim Bray’s Mourning Google, a lament about the sad decline of Google from miracle search tool to omnipresent creepy powerhouse:
The last two decades of my career featured the arcing then crashing of popular regard for Big Tech. It’s hard to believe now, the years when those lovably nerdy Bay Area kids were leading humanity to a brighter, better-lit future; our leaders were lionized and when people found out you actually worked for Google, their eyes widened and you could feel the focus.
These days, Big Tech features in hostile congressional hearings, mass layoffs, and messy antitrust litigation. It offers few experiences that can be uncritically enjoyed. While I was inside the Rooms Where It Happened, it was actually pretty hard to notice the public trust in our work auguring into the mountainside of alienation and cynicism. It’s not that I think the companies are the problem, it’s the machineries and imperatives of Late Capitalism, which for a while we foolishly thought Internet companies could route around.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien, 1954
We all take that decision daily.
It’s not easy to decide. And sometimes we must compromise about what we can do.
In September 2018 I visited the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo. I was there to see a presentation on robot toys by Mark Nagata and it was wonderful.
Kelly and I toured the museum, which includes a chronicle of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
I was looking at photos from the exhibit and one of them was of a card on Clara Breed.
Clara Breed
Clara Breed was a librarian in San Diego, California in the years before World War II. Many of the library’s most faithful patrons were Japanese American school children, and Miss Breed took a particular interest in them. She admired their diligence as well as their abilities, and was outraged when she learned that they were all being sent to concentration camps in remote areas.
Throughout the war, Clara Breed sent gifts and hundreds of letters to her young friends in camp. She also spoke out and wrote letters protesting the incarceration. The Museum has many of the poignant letters to “Dear Miss Breed” which she received during this period, some of which are reproduced on the nearby desk.
Here Miss Breed represents all of the non-Japanese American teachers and friends who helped to make life more “normal” for children in the camps, who actively protested the government’s injustices and worked to ease the pain of incarcerated people.
I worked at the San Diego Public Library as a teen. Decades after she did that work. But I’m connected to her. And I feel inspired by her. She took a decision to do right. She stuck with it.
Her work is the kind of constancy that makes the world better. It’s a bulwark against entropy.
It’s worth remembering.
It’s worth thinking about what actions we might take do to oppose chaos.
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Design and Star Trek Dan Hon’s Hallway Track 006
After going to the beach at Torrey Pines I came home to attend a thought-provoking video meeting. It was Dan Hon’s Hallway Track 006: Star Trek and Design with two very thoughtful designers, described on the event page thusly:
Lisa Maria Marquis is an information architect and author, as well as a trekkie obsessed with “Space Seed,” Garashir, and not having to bring your own costumes to the holodeck.
Dylan Wilbanks is a longtime user experience designer and director in the enterprise software world. He once gave a conference talk framed on “Cause And Effect” and will recite Sisko’s “I can live with it” speech at an Arby’s of your choosing.
The conceit of the “Hallway Track” events is that they are a replacement for the part of conferences that is often the best part–the conversations in the hall between panels and the show floor.
I enjoyed it immensely.
I will talk about what I got from it but I feel a need to ponder how I came to enjoy the Star Trek lore so much. Please accept a small digression of memory.
Star Trek has been a cultural force all my life. My grandfather, Tata, Jesus Silva loved the show and watched it in syndication, so I’m sure the first time I ever watched it was in the big-family setting of the Silva household. That household mostly liked movies on tv and soap operas and anything where Frank Sinatra showed up. But if Tata liked Trek then onto the gigantic wide-dresser tv with a vinyl turntable built-in Trek would go. In syndication, naturally.
I didn’t watch the cartoons. I watched Kirk and Spock and McCoy. “The Original Series.” I was 10 when I saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture–1980. And I remember vividly when Fed Mart was going out of business in 1982 in Clairemont here in San Diego there were plenty of Star Trek MEGO figures on the shelves as part of that final going-out-of-business sale. I bought some.
I remember looking forward to The Next Generation caming out in 1987. My friend Chris and I eagerly kibitzed on what it would be like. By that point we had talked about the science of faster than light travel and parallel dimensions and time travel and we HAD PLENTY OF OPINIONS, OKAY. Even decades later we can go into starship design and inertial dampeners and warp fields. And as kids who liked to draw, and as men who like to draw, we were sure to put a critical eye on whether what would come out with was “correct.” But we both enjoyed it. We watched. We exchanged letters and among the topics we corresponded on were whatever the latest Trek was. I have 35 years experience talking in detail about Trek.
35 years.
Thanks for letting me take that digression, I appreciate that you’ve made it this far, I well know your time is valuable.
The Hallway Track event was filled with designers. And when I say designers I believe I mostly mean user experience and visual design. And it was fascinating to hear their thoughts on Trek from that point of view. I am a software developer, often working on the frontend of things. That means I understand how design folk think. The main thing that the assembled group of 20+ people reckoned with was how design would be practiced in a post-scarcity environment. Which is to say: no money. Trek is a utopia of freedom and plenty. The characters in the Federation can go anywhere, learn anything, do anything. They are able to make their way up that Maslow hierarchy of needs and reach self-actualization. If that is the place you live, how does the practice of design change? When digital designs don’t need to generate ongoing revenue, when ARPU is not a measure the UFP cares about, how does design work?
It’s fun to think about a better world. But when a fictional world has to create serial stories one eventually will run out of imagined better worlds. The present is a much easier place to set a story. As William Gibson said on Fresh Air in 1989:
“…while there’s a convention in science fiction that one is writing about the future no one can really write about the future and I think that science fiction novels, by and large, reflect the decade that they were created in. You know the fifties SF, you look at it and it’s the fifties. And I started doing the kind of work that I’m doing because I wanted something that reflected the seventies and everything I was reading that was being written seemed to me to reflect the sixties.”
In 1995 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine set episodes in their past: 2024. That’s 29 years ago they wrote about the year I’m writing this in. I am sad to report that the homelessness and poverty and overall precarity that was imagined are still with us. So an exchange like this, about a fictional slum / ghetto is a bit creepy to read given all US urban centers currently have multiple encampments of poverty-stricken people.
- Commander Sisko:
- By the early 2020s, there was a place like this in every major city in the United States.
- Dr. Julian Bashir:
- Why are these people in here? Are they criminals?
- Commander Sisko:
- No, people with criminal records weren’t allowed in the Sanctuary Districts.
- Dr. Julian Bashir:
- Then what did they do to deserve this?
- Commander Sisko:
- Nothing. Just people, without jobs or places to live.
- Dr. Julian Bashir:
- Ah, so they get put in here?
- Commander Sisko:
- Welcome to the 21st century, Doctor.
The Bell Riots were a breaking point–a violent overthrow of these enforced slums. In the story, they will arrive in future September 2024. That’s a real date a few months away as I write that. Our time contains violent threats and unrest. As did the 1960s.
We do not have freedom from want. The socialist utopia of Trek is as far away for Americans as it was in the 1960s.
It was terrific to hear the Hallway Track group grapple with how do we get to that great future world. Capital still rules the day, we still have poverty and disease and the US still lacks a basic right to health care.
When Chris and I would talk about trek we worried more about the speed of light than anything. Though we definitely anticipated a violent 21st century. We presumed that a US-Soviet nuclear war would affect us. And we hoped that we would make it through. That’s also how William Gibson thought of it. I’ll again quote William Gibson in 1989:
- Terry Gross:
- “Your book is set after the wars, what wars did you envision and what were they fought over?”
- William Gibson:
- “Well that’s a very optimistic little piece of trickery on my part because I wanted to be able to write about a future, and I wanted to be able to say `Well it’s there.’ So I posited as a piece of background information one very, very brief nuclear exchange that results in the whole world saying `Oh no we’ve got to get rid of these things’ and then it’s, you have a future. But we should be so lucky, probably.”
I’m reminded of the memetic formulation of:
Step 1: Do a thing
Step 2: ???
Step 3: PROFIT!!!Getting to that Trek future is the thing we all want. Not for profit, but for the kind of ability to do what we please and act as we please and not to be hungry or cold or sick or lack for help or education. We want to get that better life for ourselves and our children. It’s worker rights: unionization and organization has to be a part of it. Free healthcare and education has to be part of it. Rethinking how capital and money works will be important.
When Trek first made the scene we hadn’t landed men on the moon. We were still poised for nuclear war. Civil rights were not fully enshrined for all in the US. We still don’t have that fully. And enough people don’t want that that they managed to elect a US President. It’s a disheartening time. But as always, the difficulty is also a kind of opportunity for us all.
It’s not easy to live in those question marks. Time to turn them into concrete steps.
Thanks Lisa, and Dylan, and especially Dan for organizing the Hallway Track event.
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Make A Website Already!
I am loving that more people are getting excited about making websites. I still am.
I’m not only the Hair Club president, but I’m also a client
– Seymour “Sy” Sperling, President, Hair Club for Men, 1980s
I am all in. I’ve maintained this website for two decades. I’m excited to see energy around the beautifully simple idea of self-publishing.
They take on the responsibility of keeping it running, maybe there’s a domain name for $20 a year. Maybe a hosting service that costs some money every month.
But it belongs to them. Their creative work can’t be shadowbanned or hidden. Their expression can’t be suppressed unduly. Their username is their domain name and if they maintain it, it’s theirs. When the next service comes out they don’t have to scurry to get the new one.
They don’t have to be feel morally complicit with a service that pays Nazis to be Nazis and fails to invest in adequate moderation. The failure to do that can result in real world harms like stalking and harassment and even murder.
Websites can be a far better and more personal way to be. There are many challenges to scaling the world in this way, but I’m excited for the opportunity of it.
Fútbol is life! … Websites are life!
Anil Dash points out:
it’s been remarkable to note that Tom Coates’ blog post on Threads’ meeting with community members, along with Johannes Ernst’s own take, are the definitive perspectives on the way that the industry titan is trying to engage. Both were informed by their direct participation in an otherwise closed-door meeting, with a completely different context than the usually carefully-manicured press events that are used to brief journalists about a product.
…because Personal blogs are where tech news happens.
And it need not be making news, it it useful to refine your thoughts. Tracy Durnell, last year talked about the value of regular writing on ones own website–blogging:
…a blog post needn’t fit a formal format. A lot of blogging really is ‘talking through ideas’ in text, in real time — the thinking and writing happen together. (Or at least it is for me, though I’m sure it’s not the universal blogging experience 😉) Even when a post is edited before publishing to center a specific conclusion reached through the drafting, a tenor of curious exploration or earnest passion often carries through.
…Blogs are a platform for normal people.
And for those of us who write about our day to day lives, it’s as simple as Cam Pegg quoting this perfectly titled post: Make a Damn Website, and I’ll do the same:
By centralizing not just your content, but yourself, on these sites, you rob yourself the opportunity to be more authentically you. In addition, a peer or competitor might appear next to you. It may not be great for you to have your competitor one click away from your own profile.
I don’t want to be misunderstood, because having outbound links to friends is great. But those links should be at your own discretion, not determined by an engineer writing a relevance algorithm at one of these third party websites.
the idea here, rather than focusing on an aesthetic or specific designs, is to get out of the notion that the web has to be a bunch of lists of texts, links, and inline images. you don’t have to be a designer or be particularly creative to make your webpages have more personality.
think about your real-life hobbies and interests: what outside of work do you think people would be interested in? that thing you just thought of that surely people won’t be fascinated by: that’s exactly the one that folks will flock to your website to look at.
So Make A Website Already!
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Monday Misk-ell-eh-knee-us.
Jerry Beck is my favorite animation historian, his post What did Disney ever do? is perfect. It has become the habit of the world to disdain anything seemingly-well-known. Nothing is important. And that’s simply not so. You may not like where the world is but that doesn’t mean that it’s improved over time. The world has plenty distance to improve.
If you’ve not read Cat and Girl’s comic 4000 of my closest friends please do that now. Sucking in giant databases of artist work to make “art” is morally dubious.
And here’s a movie quote of the day, from Three Kings:
- Archie Gates
- You’re scared, right?
- Conrad Vig
- Maybe.
- Archie Gates
- The way it works is, you do the thing you’re scared shitless of, and you get the courage AFTER you do it, not before you do it.
- Conrad Vig
- That’s a dumbass way to work. It should be the other way around.
- Archie Gates
- I know. That’s the way it works.
And I’ve gotten tired of finding formatted text with colons and turning it into a set of
dl, dt, dd
so I created this: Quote to DL (Definition List), which takes a set of text with a name, then a colon, then a snippet of dialogue, and formats it as a list. MDN calls it a Description List but that’s cool.I’m almost done listening to Maria Bamford’s Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult. It’s darn good. A highly specific personal story but I vibe with a lot of what’s in there. We are nearly the same age and much of it aligns with some of my own mishaps in my 20s. A worthy read and listen.
One of my favorite quips of hers, about Trump, remains:
“We cannot physically harm the president of the United States, but it is not illegal to lead him into a bramble.”
It rained over the weekend and it’s raining today. This limits my opportunities to swim in the ocean with complete confidence in the water quality. In San Diego the Surfline predictions include this standard disclaimer after a rain.
NOTE: County health officials advise against ocean water contact for up to 72 hours following a period of significant rainfall due to elevated bacteria levels – especially near drain pipes, harbors and river mouths.
Mind you, I evaluate this directive for myself. I have gone in the ocean during a rain, as I did Saturday, and it was great. And I’ve halted ocean-swimming for slightly longer periods when the rain was significant. But I’m mindful of the risk and have not gotten sick from the ocean in many years. When I do go into the water during or after a rain I am highly conscientious about rinsing my gear and my body afterwards. Gotta keep the germs off. This is all because of the runoff from urban areas that drains to ocean. That wonderful cleansing baptism of rain has side effects, alas.
That’s this morning. I have a hankering for grits right now. Whether grits are acquirable in the morning in California and not part of fancy shrimp’n’grits, who can say? I may be able to find out.
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I hankered for grits this morning. I went and found grits. And as my mother would sing: “rain, rain, go away, come again some other day”
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Phyllis Silva in the news. In 1965
The cadets at Morse have chosen Linda Conrad, a senior, to reign as queen over the annual Cadet Ball March 13 in Balboa Park. Linda will be crowned by last year’s queen, Phyllis Silva.
– National City Star-News, Volume 82, Number 54, 11 — March 1965
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MRS. CRAWFORD, 1968
MRS. CRAWFORD
St. Rita’s Catholic Church was the scene of the wedding on June 15 of Miss Phyllis Silva, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Jesus Arthur Silva of 7002 Skyline Drive, to James Joseph Crawford. The bridegroom is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph James Crawford of 4801 Mt. Gaywas Drive. After a wedding trip to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, the couple will live in San Diego. She is a graduate of Morris High School and he was graduated from Crawford High. She has completed two years at San Diego State and he has completed more than three years at State. He will enter the Army in the immediate future.There are at least two errors in this announcement from 1968. My mom graduated from Morse High School and my father from Madison High School.
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Some Bodysurfing Ephemera
It rained something awful over the last 2 days in San Diego. That makes the water quality crap due to crap runoff. So while I’m prevented from going in the ocean, I’ll disgorge a few things about bodysurfing I’ve been meaning to read and write about my favorite pastime.
First, here’s a quote I’ve been meaning to transcribe from Chapter 1 of Paul A. Kosten, Ph.D’s The Progressive Art of Bodysurfing: A Style Manual
To me, a wave is the canvas on which I express myself. That expression is not judged through the social consensus of who has just the other day completed the most maneuvers or the longest ride, but rather by a criterion known only to the rider. Bodysurfers judge themselves against their personal tastes, traits, and desired expressions.
Waves are aquatic transformations of wind energy, modified by earth’s geological contours. The art of bodysurfing transcends the notion of simply riding waves! A small canvas can be easily filled, yet expressing earth’s wave energy is more overwhelming and certainly requires more than the ability to simply, “ride a wave.” Big is not particularly better, especially since very big waves may shorten your life expectancy.
The book is a bit tricky to purchase. I bought it directly from Paul in 2020 but have no idea what the “correct” way to purchase The Progressive Art of Bodysurfing: A Style Manual now. It’s not on the two great books for bodysurfers post but that’s okay. I like it a lot. Among the great things it told me was okay: it’s okay to come out to the water, look at the surf, and decide it’s not the day to go out. For safety reasons, for whatever reasons. Discretion and discernment are valuable skills. And speaking of The Bodysurf Blog, it continues to create great items worth reading and looking at. The pieces on Candy Calhoun and George Freeth were particularly good.
Here’s a great page by Theo Pepler called “On Bodysurfing” which is not new but new to me. It included a link to President Obama bodysurfing in 2017.
And I’ll mention again the great photo Al took of me in December 2023.
More bodysurfing stuff in my bodysurfing tag page.
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Al & my Friendship-as-Garden theory
Here’s Al Abut looking through a lens:
This is not a recent photo. It’s a blurry photo I played around with this morning. I like the playfulness of it.
Adriano Santi took this photo (more or less) of Al in Seattle in 2007. I emailed Adriano and he tells me “I think Pinguino took that one actually!”, in which case thank you Ping!
16 years ago.
Al is among the people who I knew through my mailing list websandiego. I’m pretty sure I met Al originally at the San Diego Macromedia User Group. That group covered Flash, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, Freehand and Fireworks. All those products were eaten by Adobe eventually. Just as social media ate listservs.
Al and I have kept in touch over the years off and on. Friendly, I’d say. “Small pieces loosely joined.” Positive. But proximity. And activity. These nurture relationships. In the last few months: we’ve gotten out and done stuff. Lunch or coffee. Photo taking. Nature walking. The confluence of me wanting to go in the water and ride waves, and Al wanting to practice taking action photos–that’s a complementary set of wants! And boom: HANGOUT.
It’s great to be around a person with shared culture. What’s my culture? “Web page maker.” I get along with people who make web pages. I have an endless supply of stories about making web pages and more importantly I have an endless appetite for stories about making web pages.
Al moved back to San Diego not long ago. He reached out to me. Was it on Mastodon? Or did I email him? Or was it him who emailed? Or a comment on a photo somewhere? Or E) all of the above. I’m glad of how it’s played out. We’ve reconnected. It’s been a boon.
Last week he restarted writing and posting to the web: Blog Relaunch: Getting back into the writing saddle. Today he posted Hello World: Doing a proper introduction.
I encourage you to read some of his pieces. His writing is good, and his photos are really good. And I’d be saying that even if he wasn’t a friend.
Friendship is funny. It’s so vital to us. But it can be brittle. Fragile. Loneliness and disconnection are endemic. It’s hard to expose oneself to the risks of relationships. “To love is to risk” my mother liked to remind me.
Here I’ll spout my grandiose garden metaphor about friendships. Friendship is a garden that we cultivate. It’s not a bad metaphor. Friendship as a thing which requires nurturing and care, just as a garden does. It’s subject to the weather. It changes with the season. Some friendships fit in the garden, and some don’t. Some plants require particular care and climate. And some are sturdy. Some things grow without prompting. When conditions are right, incredible and unexpected beauty and joy can emerge from a garden. So much so we can share it with others. And some years, nothing goes right, and the garden goes fallow.
Friendships are only partly under our control. Some years are bad. Too much sun. Weeds. Flood. Pests. But also Murphy’s Law applies: sometimes things just aren’t right and go wrong.
But neglect. Neglect is always catastrophic.
Last night I dreamed about a lost friendship. I screwed it up. I let that person down. In the dream I ran across a person who was a friend of many years. It was not a nightmare, but it was not pleasant. As in life, they recoiled. The opportunity to repair the connection was lost. If I’m lucky maybe I’ll get a chance for friendship repair with that person. Or one of the several people who I’ve disappointed over the years.
For today I’ll be grateful that I have better skills in the garden than I did back then. I have more integrity and constancy. If I can’t talk, I can say that. If I can’t take on a task, I can say that. It’s a good practice: accountability. Do people use the term “flaky” anymore? I am hopeful for the future: I can try, try again. Which reminds me, I’m almost done listening to Maria Bamford’s book and some of her writing on her flakiness tracks with my own experiences. People told her that her unreliability was too stressful for them to deal with.
I’m lucky to have friends. And I’m very lucky to get new chances.
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Blue Hawaiian in AZ for K. (Not pictured: Sazerac for me)
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Passing in Tempe?
I’m in Tempe Arizona this morning.
It’s a lovely place. This is alongside the river this morning.
I like to swim. I can’t swim here. So where can I swim? There’s a pool at the hotel. There’s a YMCA. Those would work. But where’s the fun in that.
In researching this I came up with some interesting history here in Tempe. Kudos to the The City of Tempe for this Hispanic History. I’ve added some emphasis to a few sentences. They’re the sentences about swimming.
As more Mexican immigrants came after 1910, tensions arose between the White and Hispanic segments of Tempe. Tempe’s Hispanic pioneer families began referring to themselves as Latin-Americans or Spanish Americans to distinguish them from the new immigrants. Yet when the new Tenth Street School opened in 1912, Hispanic children were not admitted. Nor were Hispanic families allowed to swim in the Tempe Beach Swimming Pool when it opened in 1923. The old town of San Pablo became “the barrio,” a segregated community.
Tempe’s Hispanic residents resisted discrimination, however. They joined mutualistas, like the Alianza Hispano-Americana, which provided life insurance, burials, and a political voice. Residents also joined the La Liga Protectora Latina (Latin Protection League). Some residents were more direct. In 1923, Adolfo “Babe” Romo challenged school segregation in court. A judge ruled that the 10th Street School must admit Hispanic children.
During World War II, many Mexican-Americans from Tempe served in the armed forces. After the war, returning veterans demanded changes in the segregated community they lived in. Their first success was in 1946, when Hispanic families were allowed to swim at the Tempe Beach pool. In 1964, voters elected Gil Montanez to the Tempe City Council.
That’s the US alright! And stories of indigenous, and waves of settlers, and new settlers, and laws enacted to control what was new or who is darker or who is different are a dismal fact everywhere. And these things fascinate me. They spark whatever it is in my brain that wants to reckon with complicated racial history. (I believe I’ve mentioned my comic about my own racial identity)
So if I was a kid, or a teen, or an adult, in Tempe, would I have resisted the segregation law? I have the surname “Crawford” but if it were my Mom’s surname I’d be Silva. I’m named after my grandfathers “Joseph Arthur Crawford” — for Joseph James Crawford and Jesus Arthur Silva. If the names had been flipped I’d be Jesus James Silva. My mother was pretty fair complected. I have cousins and aunts and an uncle who are not. How would I have behaved, I wonder?
Would I have passed for white? I probably could have.
In reading, I found this post: A People’s Guide to Maricopa County: Tempe Park Beach, which contains these nuggets:
Other firsthand reports mentioned experiences of lighter skin Mexicans and Mexican Americans gaining entrance to the pool while they were not accompanied by darker skinned friends or family members. If they were seen with their darker skin friends they would not be admitted again, because then it was known that they too were Mexican/Mexican American.
So that’s 1923 to 1946. And once they revoked the rule, here were the new rules:
In 1946 the Tempe Beach Board revoked the “No Mexicans” policy. Mexican American families could enjoy the recreational facilities along with their Anglo neighbors as long as they complied with the rules of the “3 C’s”
- Clean Skin.
- Clean Conduct.
- Clean speech and in English.
Prioritizing English sure does stand out as “segregation but less evil” and yet still plenty evil.
Assimilation. “Be More American.” Overrated. Though, if my mom’s family had not had that desire, would my mother have met my father? I don’t like to think too hard about my Phyllis Schlafly-loving grandmother and what they thought of this Mexican-American family that her son married into. I never got any kind of inkling there was any racial animus there, and never have.
I don’t know what this all adds up to today. I may not swim today, but that’s cool. I’m learning some history and drinking great coffee and looking at lovely vistas.
I’ll leave you with two songs. The first is Somos Más Americanos by Los Tigers del Norte.
Quiero recordarle al gringo:
Yo no crucé la frontera,
la frontera me cruzó.
América nació libre,
el hombre la dividió.…which in English:
I want to remind the gringos:
I didn’t cross the border,
the border crossed me
America was born free,
Men divided itEnjoy it live:
That song is great. I can absolutely feel that song in my bones.
When one person can proclaim “BLACK LIVES MATTER”–as simple and terse a factual sentence as can be uttered–and another person can call that person a troublemaker, and anti-American for it, that’s as simple a piece of evidence of the failure–to this point–to have a proper society, where all can live together positively.
And while I’ve got you here and reading and listening to music, here’s a cover song that’s absolutely wonderful. A band called EZ Band covering The Smiths’ This Charming Man but in a Norteño style. It’s an absolute delight.
Yes, when I’m on vacation I am an oddball because I like to go headlong at painful truth and try to understand how the heck the world worked, and has worked. History tells us how we screwed up so maybe when we do new things we don’t screw up.
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It’s goofy but I do like a paper flag atop pancakes
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“ Not gonna lie, with the orange and red. I’m getting Winnie the Pooh vibes. I love it though” —Yuma drive through young woman of color barista
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At @collectorsmarketplace in Phoenix I lucked upon their moving sale and picked up this Jessica Jones statue to commemorate Kelly’s cosplay.
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Bumpin’ Morton Subotnick Double Naught Spy Car
(Is Moorpark a boulevard or a avenue?)
(Is it Moorpark Boulevard?)Cruising Moorpark
I’m looking for a hot chick
In a ’79 Pacer
I’m bumpin’ Morton Subotnick
Don’t tell me it’s the wrong approach
I’m Morgan Freeman and you’re the acting coach
Hitch up the Pacer to slip into a saloon
The waitress is from Arleta and the place is filled with goonsI’m cruising Moorpark
I’m looking for a hot chick
In a ’79 Pacer
I’m bumpin’ Morton Subotnick
Don’t tell me it’s the wrong approach
I’m coming Morgan Freeman and you’re the acting coach
Hitch up the Pacer to slip into a saloon
The waitress is from Arleta and the place is filled with goonsI know karaoke is in full effect
Tuesday night in Tarzana what the hell did I expect
You know I’m only here to get with the ladies
Yesterday was Margarita Monday at Club HadesGood god I’m bumpin’ Morton Subotnick
Good god I’m bumpin’ Morton Subotnick
Good god I’m bumpin’ Morton SubotnickMargarita Monday at Club Hades
Margarita Monday at Club HadesI’m here to get with the ladies
I’m here to get with the ladiesCruisin’ Moorpark
Cruisin’ MoorparkPicked up
And she said “whoa”
When I turned up the Penderecki
She said “baby it’s time to go”Cruisin’ Moorpark
Lookin’ for a hot chick
In a ’79 Pacer
I’m bumpin’ Morton SubotnickMmmm
Mmmm
MmmmOwwww
OwwwwMmmm
Mmmm
MmmmMorton Subotnick, Krzysztof Penderecki, Pacer, Double Naught Spy Car: Panorama City
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In any movie my favorite part is when they go to the beach. Rogue One. A Star Is Born (1954). Planet of the Apes (1968). Point Break (1991). Office Space.
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Oscillate Wildly
- Lorraine Lyon
- Now, honestly, what’s the point of being a billionaire if I can’t have somebody killed?
Kelly and I have been watching “comedy crime drama” tv show Fargo.
It started in 2014. It just finished its fifth season.
I’ve resisted all those seasons for 8 years because “comedy crime drama” usually means “lots of dumb violence and sociopaths who are hateful and useless to me.” I like a character who is useful. I like redemption, of course. The Hero’s Journey and all that. So that’s one reason.
The other reason I’ve avoided the show is that I love the film Fargo. It aligns with my beliefs and has the doleful plus hopeful tone in a Murphy’s Law universe. I had severe doubts that any tv show could be worthy of the name.
- Marge Gunderson
- I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there, Lou.
I changed my mind because I skimmed a paragraph in Alan Sepinwall‘s newsletter. And Fargo Season 5 was brilliant. Then we watched Season 2 and it was brilliant. And now we’ve started Season 1. We’re watching out of order and happy with that decision. We’ve decided ad-hoc whether to take on another season day by day.
Legion, also by Noah Hawley was a terrific show, too. It’s among the best Marvel shows so far. I’m glad we started with Season 5. Juno Temple, Jennifer Jason-Leigh and John Hamm were incredible. And it had an antic quality that worked well. Season 2 was relentless though with less comic relief overall. And Season 1 has such violence and even the funny bits–Billy Bob Thornton mostly–come with a tinge of malevolence that is rough on my psyche.
And so when my mood is more negative, I find a need to find ways to move the needle in the opposite direction. The solution? Ted Lasso.
It moves that emotional needle effectively. When Ted does “High five tree!” I knew I’d chosen the right thing.
- Keeley Jones
- You’re trending hard on Twitter right now.
- Ted Lasso
- How ’bout that.
- Keeley Jones
- Do you even tweet?
- Ted Lasso
- Nah. But I do beatbox all right. (beat boxes a line)
- Keeley Jones
- I never know how to react when a grown man beatboxes in front of me.
- Ted Lasso
- Well, I hope you never run into Biz Markie.
Self care, knowing oneself and honesty are the themes of Lasso. Good things to strive for for myself, too. Not doing those things have a result: escalating stress and anxiety. Going to the beach, reading comics, taking long baths are among the things that heal me. Because I do feel obliged to read the news: war, layoffs, Election Year news. The stressors require relievers.
Back and forth, back and forth. Opposing forces kept in tension and thus creating a more fully rounded me. That’s the theory. A person who doesn’t have forces to oppose them, or lacks the opposing external forces is not a healthy person. And so, I think of Elon Musk, despite my efforts not to think of him. This morning I read Elon Musk Lies by Joan Westenberg:
…journalists have played an unfortunate role in providing a platform for claims lacking substantiation. Republishing attention-grabbing statements without verification contributes to potential misinformation and distorted perceptions of technological progress. The personality-driven cult of Musk too often overrides a careful, conscientious journalistic process.
It’s said “never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel”. The problem is magnified when that someone is also gifted barrel-fulls of ink. Musk has very few forces which can move his needle. He’s force without counterforce.
I think we can be strengthened tension and stress. M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled has several passages talking about how all human relationships are sources of friction. He uses an extended metaphor comparing this friction to the forces of the sea wearing away at the rocks by the seaside. The stress makes the rocks, and also us. smoother and more beautiful. It’s a tricky metaphor because lacking a counterforce we and those rocks can get crushed to the size of sand.
Force. Counterforce. Alternating.
I think of the movie Colossal. It also has Jason Sudeikis in a major role. In some ways it’s a kind of midpoint between Fargo and Lasso. And it’s got giant monsters and robots, always a bonus for me. So far Fargo has not had either, but it would not surprise me if one of the seasons does. Hawley can make any outlandish thing work in his fiction and still manage to make the whole thing useful to me.
- Dorothy ‘Dot’ Lyon
- You got to eat something made with love and joy… and be forgiven.
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I’m quoted in San Diego Magazine
“I gave to Trash Lamb Gallery [because] it is talented independent local living artists sharing their art and vision of where we live, and I want to see more of that,” says local software developer Joe Crawford, a contributor to Trash Lamb’s campaign. “Working people are struggling and that means artists are struggling. San Diego has a history of similar spaces. But then the rent goes up or a landlord cancels a lease. I want to see Trash Lamb beat those odds. We’re a rich city, rich state, and rich country, but often it’s left to small donations from individuals to support the arts.”
Check out Trash Lamb Gallery