Just added a guestbook to the site. (I came across Manu’s and nostalgia kicked in a bit. Figured it might be fun.)
Blog: #meta
I’ve added a scripture reference index for my religious art, to make it easier to find pieces related to specific passages.
After holding out for a few months, I’m finally on Mastodon at @bencrowder@mastodon.social. I’ve wanted to provide a more lightweight way for readers to respond to posts (email can feel a little too formal sometimes) without adding comments to the site itself, and I think this is it.
I’ve started adding short reviews to the reading log, to make the page a little more useful. Just the 2022 reads so far, but I plan to keep going back as far as I can.
I’m back on Twitter. We’ll see it sticks this time. I still see this blog as the main channel for what I do, though.
After nine months of issue blogging (posting issues of Prints), I’ve decided it’s time to return to stream blogging.
A quick retrospective: publishing issues was fine (the structure helped, for example), but for a personal blog I’m now less convinced that it’s the right fit. Looking forward to posting more freely and frequently.
Small milestone I almost forgot about: this website turned twenty this year.
January 23, 2001. It’s possible I started it before that day, but that’s the first reference to it I’ve found in my journals.
Tinkering on the site all these years has been a delight. Truly one of my favorite activities.
A couple quick updates:
Today was my last day at Cedar (formerly OODA Health before the acquisition), and on Monday I start a new job at Hologram.
I’m finally getting around to writing Cast, the new backend engine for this site. The plan is to go full static and deploy via Render. Also planning to move my personal apps over. While I’m still probably a couple months away from having everything migrated, I’m so, so looking forward to not maintaining a personal server anymore. (It’s fun, sure, and I’ve learned a lot, but it’s stressful — yesterday’s Let’s Encrypt root certificate expiration bit me thanks to an old OpenSSL version, for example — and it’s no longer something I want to spend time on for personal projects.)
For those subscribing via RSS or JSON Feed: I’ve added the post tags to the top of each post, mirroring what you see on my site.
(My reasoning for including the tags and putting them at the top, by the way, is to make it a little easier to see at a glance what a post is about and whether you want to skip it.)
We’re overdue for some kind of general life update, I think. Weeknotes-that-are-not-weeknotes:
- The health issues I referred to in May are still largely unchanged, though I’ve come to terms with it enough that I should probably stop using it as an excuse for lower productivity. (I do need to rest more than I used to, but I also feel like I’m spending proportionally less time making things than is warranted. I’m now tracking my time using a completely rewritten version of Momentum, so I should hopefully have more actual data to work with soon.)
- We’ve also had a month of worrisome family medical issues (including two late-night ER visits) that have been weighing me down.
- On the plus side, I got some lab results that finally motivated me to start exercising more and make real changes to my diet. I’m three weeks in and the lifestyle adjustments seem to be sticking. Fingers crossed.
- The rising case counts and Delta situation certainly is discouraging. My faith in humanity in the aggregate has eroded significantly over the past year and a half.
- In spite of a spectacular lack of public results, I’m still writing, slowly. (Much more successful at avoiding it.) In the middle of figuring out a process that consistently gives me a) results that b) don’t make me cringe.
- I’ve been trying to keep artmaking to the weekends so I have more of a chance at making progress with my writing, but it doesn’t seem to be working as well as I’d hoped.
- Another thing I’ve been itching to do is get back into making web-based art tools like Cirque (which needs a lot of improvement). Several ideas here I’m excited to work on.