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]?

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: