this blog of mine

Curiously unmotivated

Yesterday (Saturday, August 27, 2022, for the record) I was curiously unmotivated to post. I was up late and as I watched the time tick by, and it got closer to midnight, I thought, “I should at least post something, even just a haiku.” and yet I did not. I watched some videos, I had a nice shower, I did some reading. I slept.

I regret none of these things. Sometimes you just need to let everything slip away and get lost in your own head for a while. Which I did.

Now that that’s done, here’s a haiku and a cat:

Enjoying nothing
Is no easy thing to do
Brains don't shut down nice

Cat:

Thinking about overthinking and drawing a conclusion (also actually drawing)

Back in this post I wrote the following:

Draw a line every day. Don’t try to do more, don’t try to be perfect, just do a line, every day (or write a sentence every day or throw some clay, or whatever your creative pursuit happens to be). Emphasize quantity over quality and develop your skills without pressure to produce great art every time you sit down (or stand at your fancy sit/stand desk).

Some guy on the internet who looks just like me

I have done a few drawings since then. One every day? No. I have failed. I am bad and should feel bad.

I feel bad.

It’s such a simple premise, but I got caught up in the quest for perfection again. “I can’t just draw junk, it has to be something,” I’d think. And then it would be time for bed, and off to sleep I’d go! Repeat multiple times.

So here I am confessing on the interweb and trying to atone. Will I draw a line today? A mad veggie? I don’t know, but I will draw something, even if it’s junk. I promise!

I am weirdly fascinated by Microsoft’s 3D emoji

To be accurate, the emoji are not actually 3D, they’re just shaded to give a 3D appearance. Microsoft recently made them open source via Github for anyone to use. And I want to use them (okay, maybe not all of them) because they’re just so adorable, odd or both.

Ars Technica story
Github link

Admittedly, some of them veer toward nightmare-inducing. Observe the pseudo-3D clown:

But this cow face is so dang cute!

Someone in the comments of the Ars story said the surprised face emoji “looks like someone got kicked in the nuts” and I can’t really argue otherwise:

I wonder how easy it would be to add these to WordPress? I wonder how much I would abuse them if I did?

Somewhere, Mavis Beacon is laughing at me

Yes, it’s come to this. I mistype the word “humidity” so often, and I’m now talking about it so much, that I’m now using the Mac’s built-in text replacement tool to fix my persistent misspelling of the word:

I will always regret not taking that typing class in high school. With real typewriters and everything. I wonder if schools expect kids to start Grade 1 as advanced typists now. “Todd, you can’t take recess break until you hit at least 75 wpm!”

Current humidity is 55%

UPDATE: It’s not working! Apparently the text expander doesn’t work in Firefox or browsers or something. I am sad. And full of typos.

No, the stylesheet didn’t go haywire

I tinkered with the color of links last night and went for some kind of blue, but it’s just temporary as I mull The Great Blog Redesign of 2022. Yes, I’m committing to doing it this year, which means I have just under five months to keep to my self-imposed schedule.

We’ll see how it goes!

Drafty no more

I had over 40 draft posts saved up on the blog and I knew a bunch of them were just titles and nothing more, since WordPress aggressively (and thoughtfully) autosaves as you go, so last night I took the time to purge the drafts and in the end, I did it. Yay!

Here’s how it turned out:

  • I published one old post as new
  • I copied 11 partial drafts into a Blog Ideas folder in Obsidian, where they will live, likely forever or at least until bit rot claims them
  • The remainder and majority of the incomplete drafts were NUKED FOREVER

It felt good.

Now to get back to my blog redesign, ho ho.

A quick draft

Now I can check off “Use the WordPress Quick Draft” feature from my bucket list.

If it had been on it to begin with. Which it wasn’t. Nor ever will be.

Fake edit: This feature literally just lets you enter some text into a box and click a Save Draft button. That’s it. I guess it’s useful if you happen to be on the WordPress Dashboard, have inspiration strike and must record your incredible moment of insight ASAP, lest it be lost forever.

On my mind: Why does Quick Draft exist? Also, why is world peace so elusive?

In other bloggy news, I’ve changed the fonts in an attempt to give the blog a slight refresh, going with a somewhat matched set of:

  • Roboto – for body text
  • Roboto Slab – for headings
  • Mr Roboto – for people who have been bad and must be punished

I am feeling the need for change, but at the same time I’m not even sure if I want to stick to WordPress. Or start a new, different blog. Or something. All I know is I am restless and things will happen. Soon. Not fake soon™, but actually soon!

Posting from iA Writer

I still can’t post from a toaster yet, but I can post from yet another writing app, iA Writer. But only from the Mac version because they secretly hate Windows or something. Or maybe it’s Microsoft’s fault. I don’t know.

A few notes on this for future reference:

  • The title gets put in the title (yay), but also at the top of the post itself (???)
  • You can’t pick categories or tags
  • It posts using the “Classic” block, though you can choose to Convert to blocks afterward

Overall, not as robust as Ulysses and not something I would find myself using very often (or maybe ever again), but probably better than posting from a toaster. Probably.

RANDOM BONUS OBSERVATION: I left the “u” out of the word “fault” and the spelling checker did not know what word I meant to type (ie. it did not suggest “fault” as an option). We are still safe from SkyNET for a while yet.

Now with less social media!

I’ve removed the share links to social media from the site because:

  • I don’t think they have ever been used
  • They add code from the sites to my site, and can cause browser issues for people who may be using things like Firefox’s Facebook container add-on
  • Social media is bad and should feel bad. I’m just doing my tiny little part to help save democracy. I think.

There are still a few options, though:

  • You can still send a post link via email. Yes, email. How quaint!
  • You can save to Pocket to read and enjoy later a post later. I have several posts where this is actually not a terrible idea!
  • I’ve added a Like button, to either boost or destroy my ego. I wonder if bots can click it? I’ll find out soon! I did not like the Like button being slapped on everything. No one should like that much stuff. Removed!

2021 in review: This blog

blog blocks wallpaper
The image search results for “blog” are amazing. I went with the obvious, though. Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels.com

I counted, using all of my fingers and toes, the number of posts I made to this blog in 2021. My math skills are questionable, but it appears I made 399 posts. If I had known I was that close, I would have written one more to hit an even 400.

Still, it works out to more than a post per day, which is my intended goal, and while one can argue the quality of the content, I’m happy to meet that goal.

Really, that’s the only stat I can be bothered to look up. There was no real pattern, otherwise, just lots of random stuff about everything, as is my way.

About one-quarter of the posts were drawings, which is a new high. I’m happy with that. This year I’m hoping to do better.

On this site itself, the redesign I have planned is still in the works. It’s tricky since WordPress doesn’t really have a way to create and maintain a staged environment. I sometimes think about moving to something else, but would the grass be greener elsewhere, or would it just have its saturation turned way up in Photoshop [nerd joke]?