This is from the first year of the strip, 1950:
General
Black Friday is now Blackvember
At least going by the promotions sluicing into my email inbox this month. At least I didn’t see eggnog on the grocery store shelf before Halloween. Or I didn’t notice it.
Anyway, happy shopping holiday thing to everyone! I will accept any and all gifts you may wish to send that aren’t alive, harmful or versions of Windows prior to 95.
Freedom, terrible freedom
A little while back, I gave myself permission to post whatever I liked to this blog, with no filters:
- Complaints? Sure! Though I try to minimize them.
- Lists? I love lists.
- Writing prompts? The sillier, the better. My inspiration.
- Running updates? These are very skippable if you’re not me, though I started adding photos in the last year so at least there are pretty pictures as you scroll past.
- Drawings and doodlings? When I have stuff to show, sure.
- Self-referential posts about the blog like this one? Oh yes.
- Recipes? No. Or not yet, anyway.
- Things I like? Sometimes!
- Reviews? I review every book I read, though my book reading cratered with the pandemic. I also review movies, but watch far fewer now, also a change since the pandemic. And sometimes I do not choose wisely, like when I thought watching Moonfall might be a good use of my time.
- Other random stuff? I like random stuff.
All of this is a way of saying that I am again having a hard time coming up with stuff to write about, though there should be lots for me to ramble on about. I think I am afraid that anything I write might come out as a complaint because the world is, in many ways, kind of awful (See? I’m kind of doing it right now!) and it feels hard to avoid. I don’t want to just slap on a happy face and pretend everything is groovy, either.
Usually this is where I end with a random cat, but for a change of pace, here is a random sign I photographed a few weeks back1It’s found on the bins in parks for disposing of dog poop. It looks somewhat cooler when seen in isolation :
The somewhat freaky video for “Prime Time”
“Prime Time” is the first song and a single from The Alan Parsons Project’s 7th album, Ammonia Avenue. As songs go, it’s catchy and poppy. I had somehow missed the video, which dates back to the album’s release in 1984, and it’s like “What if that mannequin episode of The Twilight Zone, but as a music video?”
It’s also, in its own way, very 1980s (the thumbnail always makes me think a Village People video is about to start).
Behold the story of mannequins come to life, then try to reconcile it to the song lyrics1:
- You can kind of match the video to the lyrics, with a little (lot?) of poetic license: “And it’s a prime time/Maybe the stars were right/I’ve got a premonition/It’s gonna be my turn tonight” ↩︎
I am retro
When I look at my current blog design (captured in screenshot form below for posterity, and for when it inevitably changes) it occurs to me that it is quite retro and I hadn’t consciously realized it. Today, I happened to look at someone else’s blog and it was very typical of what you see on most sites–clean white expanses, black text, little in the way of links or other clutter. Just the posts and that’s about it.
Conversely, my site currently:
- Slaps you in the face with not one, but two bright colours, one that surrounds that traditional black text on white “standard” look.
- Has a Categories list. Seriously, this is a standard part of WordPress, but I seldom ever come across it elsewhere.
- An Archives dropdown. Also pretty rare and another built-in part of WordPress. This one is mostly for me, though. Also, easily seeing how many posts I’ve made per month is oddly satisfying.
- The design isn’t cluttered, exactly, but it isn’t overly spacious, either. I feel most sites have a lot more white space. Mine is…cozier? Maybe it’s just more cramped.
And I’ve actually stripped away a lot of the stuff I used to have. The menus at the top are gone, the logo is now just text.
Maybe one day I’ll finish that redesign. For now, I’ll probably just continue to add bits back, content to have a blog that looks very 2005.
My site, as of November 14, 2023:
A few shots after the Friday, November 10, 2023 windstorm
We had a windstorm blow through the area (as windstorms do) on the night of November 10th, a few days ago as I write this.
I went birding the next day and captured a few shots of the destruction while walking down the Brunette River trail.
First, the pretty. The wind yoinked a bunch of leaves off the trees, making the trail resplendent in fall colours:
And the destruction. This was the largest piece of debris on the river trail I saw, and definitely not something you would want clobbering you on the head at 70-90 km/h:
This rare non-run day shot from the top of the Cariboo Dam shows that the morning after the storm was actually pretty decent:
The tags page is back, woo
A couple of things to note here:
- The Tags (all of them) page is back and can now be found at the bottom of the right sidebar (unless I arbitrarily move it)
- There are a lot of tags
- I mean, there are over 400 tags
- Most of the tags are weird and only appear once
- This is a great way to explore posts on the site that aren’t a) about my jogging b) me complaining about Apple or c) my current weight
- I previously used a plugin but am now using a shortcode. Currently, it:
- displays tags in alphabetical order
- shows a count for how many times each tag has been used
- does NOT show tags starting with numbers or other special characters. This is only a few tags, but I may add these back in later
- Enjoy!
The secret to blog success is to post nothing!
Or so it would seem, looking at the stats for this blog of mine.
I usually have 10–30 visitors to the site per day, which is fine because I don’t advertise or promote in any way, there’s no definable hook (it’s just me posting whatever, plus lots of jogging updates) and the design is nothing special.
But then, on November 9th (two days ago as I type this), I got over 400 visitors. I did not post that day. The day before I posted about my knee, which I suspect is not a huge draw, though I did post a link to a Charlie Stross talk that I found entertaining and on-point the day after.
But still, weird.
Anyway, to anyone who visited, please root around, you’re bound to find something at least mildly entertaining. Maybe I’ll throw up (!) my gigantic page of tags again, that’s always good fun.
WordPress 6.4 is here!
I’m like Steve Martin in The Jerk1Yes, I am referencing a movie that came out in 1979. I am old. when the new phone book arrives2Remember phone books? I do, due to the aforementioned condition of being old.. So very excited!
Actually, I confess, I am not excited. The new features sound good, but I am concerned about further UI regressions. I see the Preview “hand iron” icon is still there, so that is not promising.
But I will maintain a positive outlook, because it feels like I’ve been crabby lately, and I don’t need to be crabby to drive engagement, because I don’t have engagement! I can be free to be positive, or thoughtful, or rambling, whatever I choose to be.
I have gotten off-track a bit.
Apparently, you can apply lightbox effects to images now. Let’s try that! I have checked the new Expand to click option for the image below, which should make it full-screen and all immersive up in the hizzzy.
It seems to work. I’m not sure if I prefer this over the FooBox lightbox. Let’s try that one below and compare for science. Same image:
It looks like both pretty much give you the same larger image, but FooBox dims the rest of the browser window, retains the caption, and adds a border. On the other hand, the built-in lightbox plays a zippy animation when expanding the image to the larger size and feels all dynamic and modern.
On balance, I think I prefer the FooBox version, but I appreciate the new option1.
- Just like the footnotes WordPress added previously, which I occasionally use now, especially if I want my posts to look like high-falutin’ essays. ↩︎
This is today’s 16th post
As mentioned somewhere in among the flurry of today’s posts, I have this informal rule on my blog, to post once per day. I later amended this to allow me to have a day or two slip by, post-free, as long as I ended up with an average of one post per day by the last day of the month.
Since instituting this, I have posted a lot more. Is this a good thing? Sometimes! Maybe even most of the time, if only just.
Then I thought, Why not more? More more more.
So I unofficially decided to try for two posts per day. This would seem twice as hard, but it is, in fact, much harder. Also, if you start falling behind, it becomes even tougher to catch up. Kind of like if you’re halfway through National Novel Writing Month and your lack of output means you need to write 3,000 words per day for the last two weeks. You just throw your hands up in the air and surrender. Or in 2023, you get ChatGPT to write the novel for you.
Anyway, when I got up today, I realized I would not hit that two post per day average this month, as I had written 46 posts, well short of the needed 62. It meant I’d have to spew out 16 more posts in a single day to hit my goal, which I’d never done before, nor even come close to doing before.
But I did it tonight! This is the 16th post I’ve put up today and the 62nd for the month, averaging two per day. Hooray for me! I will now celebrate by going to bed.
Also, I’m never doing this again1Quite possibly a big fat lie..
I love this cat
Once upon a time on a forum I used to post to regularly, someone posted something that was absurd in that way that makes you stop and stare, as if you have witnessed an accident where you can’t quite figure out what happened.
In response, I found and posted this animated GIF. It’s just about perfect, really.
Star Trek: The Animated Series, my great (?) idea
Star Trek: The Animated Series, which aired 1973-1974, was kind of like the fourth season of the original series, with most of the cast returning to voice their characters, and a lot of the series’ writers onboard, too.
It just had one small problem: the animation was terrible. It was a Saturday morning cartoon, and in the 70s that meant cheap animation done quick.
My idea: Take the original voice work and redo the animation to modern standards. It could be a bit stylized, and you’d probably want to keep it non-CGI, but there’s a galaxy of room for improvement here. Sound effects and music could be retained, or reworked, on a case-by-case basis.
Package up the refurbished episodes (22 in total) and put them on a nice Blu-ray with bonus material and doodads. Also make them available for streaming. Oh, and include the original versions of the episodes, for purists who prefer terrible animation.
Make it so! (I know, wrong series. Kirk doesn’t have any good catchphrases that fit here.)