this blog of mine

This blog of mine

This blog of mine was started in 2005 and is approaching 16 years of age. It will make a terrible driver when it gets its license.

Here are a few random stats as I contemplate where to next take this blog (of mine):

  • 3,597 posts
  • All-encompassing General category has 1,151 posts. The next most:
    • 673 for Outdoor runs. One might say I obsessively document my runs. I say I’m thorough.
    • 381 for Health. I’m sure this has been on an upward trend as I get older and closer to being a Futurama-style head in a jar
    • 294 for Writing. So many dreams crushed. But some good laughs, too.
    • 237 for Photography. This went up significantly in the last three years and bird pics started in January 2021 after I got a mirrorless camera.
    • 220 for Creative. Like photography, most of these posts happened in the last few years, seeing a big uptick when I did Inktober in 2019 and 2020.
    • 100 for Lists. It’s probably higher than this, I sometimes forget to use the Lists category. I liked lists before listicles became a thing. Also, listicle is a gross-sounding word.
  • 26 comments (most very early on, when I asked people to test comments–they pretty much count as a vestigial feature at this point)
  • 46 pages (only a handful are actually publicly viewable, but I’ve deleted very few once they’ve been made)
  • 2,418 spam comments blocked (this is pretty low, considering how long the site has been up–even the spambots generally ignore this site)
  • 61 posts in September 2020. I was posting my snack intake every day. I took in a few snacks.
  • And so much more

In 2022 I plan on reworking the site design, which will make it magical or something. I expect it will still be mostly ignored, but that’s okay. As blogs come in and go out of fashion, creolened.com will be here, wearing its bell bottom jeans and not caring who (if anyone) looks.

I started a newsletter

No, I don’t know why. But I can explain how I got here:

  1. I decided I wanted to move away from Gmail for [reasons]
  2. I began searching for other email services
  3. I initially settled on Outlook.com because I already had a subscription to Office Microsoft 365, anyway
  4. Outlook.com is mostly fine but doesn’t really do anything new with email, and the UI is bland and boring. I began looking again.
  5. I settled on trying out HEY email. Yes, they like you to spell it all shouty like that. HEY got me a new email address and I like the way it looks. It does a few things differently and while I’m not yet convinced I’ll stay with it long term, it’s a fine second email service for me to play around with.
  6. HEY offers something called HEY World, which lets you write an email that gets posted to your own custom mini-blog. Mine is here: https://world.hey.com/stan.james
  7. Two friends humored me and subscribed, but the whole thing is pretty basic. But it gave me a taste of something different, and eventually I wanted more.
  8. Today is also the day that Austin Kleon moved his weekly newsletter to Substack. I read several other Substack-hosted newsletters and began mulling moving my random thoughts from HEY World to Substack, where I can experiment and be weird on the internet.

Which brings me to my Substack newsletter, cleverly titled Stan’s Random Newsletter. You can see it here: https://stanjames.substack.com/ (I also have a handy link on the right sidebar of this blog.)

Can I just keep posting random nonsense here on my blog? Yes! Will I continue doing so? Yes! So why use Substack? Because there’s something about a newsletter that’s different, even if it’s simply the convenience of sending the random thoughts directly to someone via email. If they like the random thoughts, they can get more without doing anything. No websites to remember, no fuss, no muss (what is muss, anyway?)

I have no idea how long I’ll keep this up or what will come of it, but I’ll play around with it for a while and see where it goes. I’ll start by padding it out with some of my HEY World posts, because a smart author knows how to utilize existing resources. Or something.

A second trip back in time, to Tuesday, January 27, 1987

This is another entry from the handwritten journal I kept back in 1987. I had been living in Vancouver for five months at the time and was 22 years old.

My handwriting was extremely neat back then.

You can read one other journal entry that I posted to this blog, way back in 2012: Travel with me back in time to Saturday, January 24th, 1987

Tuesday, January 27, 1987. 10:53 p.m. When worlds collide, headaches follow.

Sorry, nothing even slightly, vaguely, infinitesimally exciting happened today.

Goodnight.

No, really. Work was uninteresting, after work was uninteresting, sleep was uninteresting.1Alright, I’m just guessing that sleep will be uninteresting. We’re talking boring here.

Briefly, for the sake of posterity, here are the lowlights:

  • I got up
  • I dressed, ate breakfast and left for work
  • I worked
  • I came home
  • I talked to Mike on the phone
  • I washed dishes and cleaned up
  • Brook came over and worked on his play
  • I watched (with brook) Moonlighting (a rerun, strangely).
  • I went to bed

And now, goodnight for real.

Log off: 11:20 p.m.

Supplementary note, 12:09 a.m.:

Okay, seeing Tiny Tim being pelted by snowballs during the New York Giants Superbowl Celebration was kinda fun. Those fans, ya gotta love ’em!

This is, as you can see, not a particularly memorable entry, but it is short, which is why I’ve included it until I can see if there’s any kind of text recognition software that can convert my stunningly neat handwriting into electronic form. Also note that the footnote was originally presented with an asterisk and was written in all caps vertically on the left side of the page. I’m going to re-read more of this journal, to possibly gain insights, but mostly to see how funny I was as a young adult. I hope I don’t disappoint myself.

Thus endeth the parade of anything I can think of, May 2021 edition

This is the 11th post I’ve made today, which may be a record. And with #11 I have officially hit 31 posts for the month, keeping to my “one post per day” rule intact, which is actually more like a “post the equivalent number of times to match one-post-per-day for the month in question” rule. Which has worked out so far, so why change now?

I could go for a Sausage and Egg McMuffin right now.

Secret entry

Dear Diary,

Why is it I sometimes freeze when it comes to writing, even on this blog where I have repeatedly demonstrated I have no issue sharing half-baked thoughts, ill-formed ideas and otherwise questionable content. Is it because I know the internet can supply me with an endless stream of cat gifs to substitute for that content?

I think that’s it, actually. I don’t have a solution for this, only a vow to try harder the next time the freeze happens, and to resist posting cat gifs in place of my own words, doodlings or videos of interpretive dance.

Sincerely,

Me

P.S. That said, here’s one more cat gif because why the hell not at this point:

The strange sensation of having no ideas

Ideas are generally easy to come by, it’s the execution that’s hard. This is why you generally don’t pay someone for a good idea, because anyone can come up with something decent.

Usually.

But for the past month or so, when I have sat down to write something on this blog, without having something already in mind, I feel this strange sensation, almost like my brain is being slowly suffocated, as if any possible idea is squashed before it can escape.

This is why I often write nothing at all. Because the few feeble ideas–a haiku, for example, yield either nothing (that word again) or results that are so tepid I won’t post them just to spare the bots scraping the site.

I have no grand point here, but I do vaguely hope that articulating this will help. We shall see.

I have moved! (This site)

After 16 years I have moved this site to a new host. The old host provided excellent support but had clearly moved away from webhosting, so it seemed like a good time to pull up stakes and move to a host that was actually focused on webhosting.

From the user’s perspective (both of you), nothing has changed, this is all backend stuff.

The process of moving was very simple, I never even had to post a blinking “Under construction” sign, though I really wanted to, and will do so now:

The most amazing website on the internet is going away

Today I got an email from Telus telling me they are shutting down personal webspace as of May 31, 2021:

The notice is amusing in how they try to avoid saying, “Everyone totes uses Facebook now, move your cat pictures there.”

So I went to the URL to see what I had put up (if anything) and it turns out to be, in fact, a picture of my long-deceased cat (who was alive at the time, I should note).

Here is the amazing HTML code I wrote ALL BY MYSELF back in 2008 or whenever it was.

<html>

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<title>Ned's homepage</title>
</head>

<body bgcolor="#000080">

<p><font face="Verdana" color="#FFFFFF" size="2"><b>Kitty!</b></font></p>
<p><img border="0" src="hello_kitty.jpg" width="618" height="461"></p>

</body>

</html>

For a brief time you can see this wondrous site here: http://www3.telus.net/public/a4a98643/

For anyone checking in after May 31, I have carefully replicated the webspace below:

Posting from MarsEdit

Yes, once again I have found another way to post to my blog. I am getting ever-closer to posting from a fridge or toaster.

This time I am posting from MarsEdit, which is software specifically designed to let you write blog posts and then post them…to your blog. Setting it up was dead simple and it works offline, which is nice if my connection flakes out but I SIMPLY MUST BLOG.

I can already do this in Ulysses, too, so I will have to see how MarsEdit makes things better or sexier.

And to conclude, a funny cat:

External content duckduckgo com

This blog of mine and a bonus fat update

I’ve decided that it’s time to give the entire site an overhaul. As groovy as the Cooper black logo is, the overall design of the site is stale and a bit cluttered, as some sections have been neglected and others are a bit too buried.

I also need to find a way to make the running posts optional. Or maybe start a running blog. And then start running again.

My current thought is something like this:

  • Come up with a new compact logo that can sit in the top-left
  • Remove the entire set of menu bar items along the top
  • Add a left sidebar with simple links to all the usual stuff (archives, etc.)
  • Have “noteworthy items” in the right sidebar
  • Continue to post the usual nonsense for the actual blog part in the middle
  • Try to allow for a “customized feed” so people can skip stuff of little interest to anyone but me, like my running updates (or maybe post them elsewhere, like in a journal or a private/separate blog)

This is going to take a while, and I’m going to try to make it work with my current theme, GeneratePress, because I have grown so used to it (and it works well). For now, I will be frequently playing around with different fonts and things that are easy to change on the fly.

BONUS FAT UPDATE: I have hit a high of 179.7 pounds. This is ominously close to 180 pounds, which would be a bit devastating to hit psychologically. Today I weighed in almost two hours earlier, which usually results in the weight being higher. I watched the numbers flick past 180 before settling back to…179.7 pounds (again).

This week I have returned to work and I have experienced an odd combination of stress, frustration and simple boredom. I have partaken of crackers, but not excessively so.

On the other hand, I’ve gotten very good at not eating anything after dinner. Yay on that. I am also drinking more water, as I find more than a little (diet) soda now seems to be giving me heartburn.

Further incentive on losing weight: I have a bunch of old t-shirts that still look great but are too snug to wear right now. I tried on a pair of cotton shorts I normally wear in the summer–they are a size 31 waist, which is one size higher than my usual 30–and could not do up the button. It was physically impossible. I was embarrassed. But I vowed not to buy new clothes that would fit–I’m not going to backslide and give myself an out in the battle against fat.

I will lose the weight. Just weight and see (ho ho).

The unbearable-ness of being

It’s been awhile since I actually just rambled about something on the blog, so here I am posting words and stuff.

I feel behind on the Making Art Everyday thing and have not, in fact, been making art every day. This month switched to people, and it started okay, with the different facial features. I missed Friday, which was bad, then I missed Saturday, which was worse. I caught up on Friday and Saturday, which is good, but then fell behind on Sunday, then Monday and now Tuesday.

I’m not sure if I’ll do anything tonight, which means I’ll have to catch up on three days:

  • Heads
  • Happy
  • Sad

It is appropriate that it ends on sad. I am sad. This may change, we’ll see. But right now I am anti-inspired. And looking at the hair sketch still makes me weep. I may have to redo it even if I never do another drawing after that, just to know it’s been replaced.

I have no more thoughts on this so I’ll end here. Perhaps I will post again soon. Perhaps it will be an amusing cat.

Or maybe I’ll post an amusing cat RIGHT NOW.