Dan J’s Website

Music Notes: AFI – Silver Bleeds the Black Sun

2025-12-13T13:02:52-08:00

First, I love the title and the cover art. Basically any reference to "black sun" gets me, because as a teenager I loved Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun, and one of my favourite books was Black Sun Rising by C.S. Friedman...

So there's some aspect of nostalgia there. And, indeed, the sound of this album feels nostalgic to the gloomy goth-rock of, say the '80s, bands like (TK I can't think of their names... sisters of mercy? the cure? no, who else?). Though my nostalgia for those acts comes from much later, the early 2000s, when my friend Jay and I used to haunt the weekly Goth Night at a hole in the wall upstairs in Osborne Village.

'80s music and culture is a funny one: I was born in the early '80s, but was therefore too young to grow up with that culture. I tend to think it's the music and culture that's popular when you're a teenager that shapes which decade you are "of"—so I'm firmly a nineties kid and not an eighties kid.

I discovered AFI around the same time as Goth Night; my college buddy Eric turned me on to them, alongside punk and hardcore stuff like Avenged Sevenfold, Rise Against, Alexisonfire, and Anti-Flag. I don't listen to any of that stuff as much as I used to, my early twenties having been much more fertile soil for the semi-formed rage that attuned itself to that music.

AFI is probably the most enduring of that era's favourites; I've seen them in concert many times (h/t to my friend Chelsea for flying out here to see them with me again when she'd already seen them in her hometown!), and still like throwing on the classics. Like most bands with a multiple-decade career, the period where I first discovered them tends to remain my favourite¹: Sing the Sorrow, Decemberunderground, and Crash Love tending to be the most my taste, compared to the punkier stuff that came before or the stuff that came after, which, like Silver Bleeds the Black Sun, feel gloomier and, I don't know, throw-backier, than that sweet spot.

See also Metallica. A high school friend introduced me to “The Black Album”, which I later learned was notorious among many longtime fans for its departure from the rougher sound of their earlier albums. Accordingly, it took me a while to fall in love with their older stuff... and much of what came later just never landed with me. ↩

Anil Dash on the Courage of the Wealthy and Powerful

2025-12-11T17:53:04-08:00

“There’s no point in having fuck-you money in the bank if you never say ‘fuck you’!”

Gina Trapani's "Stuff I built just for me in 2025"

2025-12-07T20:43:51-08:00

I find everything about Gina Trapani's website Note to Self inspiring, including this post about simple programming projects she's done for herself.

I'm definitely going to crib this idea; both the making of simple scripts and apps for myself (which I'm already doing), and the sharing of them here.

Ian Fieggen’s Website

2025-12-07T11:47:07-08:00

Having just gotten my winter boots repaired, I once again had recourse to Ian Fieggen's indispensible database of shoe-lacing tutorials. But this time I ended up on his homepage and his site is such a joyously retro collection of interesting things (sort of like how I aspire to have this site be.)

So come for the shoelaces, stay for this moving tribute to his father, Chris.

I love a website that's been online since the '90s. Represent, Professor Shoelace.

Music Log: Teddy Swims

2025-12-04T12:47:27-08:00

I just came across musician Teddy Swims, from hearing Lose Control in a hair salon and looking him up. I just listened to his album I've Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 1.5)¹ and I love it.

Sound reminds me of discovering Gnarls Barkley² and Fitz and the Tantrums 15 years ago. Will probably buy a copy of the album—I'm trying to do that more these days instead of streaming.

Top marks for both title and semantic versioning scheme. 😂 ↩
Gnarls Barkley's website doesn't seem to resolve when I tried it, and looking at the Wayback Machine, seems like it's just been a redirect to Spotify in recent years. 🫤 But check out this version from 2009, it's pretty cool. ↩

Fascinating Weirdo: Mike Raven

2025-12-01T08:22:32-08:00

Austin Churton Fairman (15 November 1924 – 4 April 1997), who used the name Churton Fairman but was more widely known under the pseudonym Mike Raven in the 1960s and early 1970s, was a British radio disc jockey, actor, sculptor, sheep farmer, writer, TV presenter and producer, ballet dancer, flamenco guitarist and photographer.

I love clicking on a person with a curious name in the cast list for some movie and discovering such a strange and interesting life!

Needy Programs

2025-11-18T19:46:25-08:00

The most obvious example is user accounts. In most cases, I, as a user, don’t need an account. Yet programs keep insisting that I, not them, “need” one. I don’t. I have more accounts already than a population of a small town. This is something you want, not me.

I could not agree more with every word of this.

(Also, hey! This dude made one of my favourite fonts!)

Kiwix

2025-10-01T21:31:53-07:00

This is a free app that lets you download entire websites as single files for offline browsing (their headliner is downloading Wikipedia). Not sure this is immediately useful, but it feels useful. Bookmarked to try sometime.

How to Read More

2025-10-01T20:54:58-07:00

So much of enjoying something involves knowing how to enjoy it.

This is a post about books, but that there is a truth about everything.

Via Subscriber Writing, September(ish) 2025 - Freddie deBoer

Considering Jellyfin 🪼

2025-09-20T13:34:32-07:00

I've been a long-time user of Plex, and a happy one. I have a lifetime Plex Pass from back before it was a subscription. There are great client apps for Plex, like Prologue for managing and listening to your audiobook library.

And yet... Plex is closed-source, and some things about it have been turning me off a little, lately. The other day I got a push notification from the Plex app on my phone, helpfully advising me of a limited time deal on a Plex Pass. This sucks for two reasons: first, like I said, this offer is not relevant to me as I have a lifetime pass. Second, when apps use push notifications to advertise, I turn off their permission to send notifications, which makes the app less useful. This is not as big a deal for Plex (exactly what do I need my media player to notify me about when I'm not using it, anyway?) as for, say, a messaging app where push notifications provide a lot of the app's utility (glaring at you, MySudo). But still.

Then there's the way Plex tries to provide content from other places than my own media library. That's not a bad thing, but I find myself just wanting to manage a media library without encroaching voices from outside—I'd like to use an app that feels like a tool to get a job done, not a SaaS product where its creators are constantly sticking their opinions in—"We think you should look at / think about this now!" No. "Insufficient Sources of Entertainment" is not a problem I have, or anyone else has, in 2025. Stop bugging me.

While I'm not gung-ho to get away from Plex at the moment, I am considering alternatives. Jellyfin seems like a frontrunner, here are the links I've gathered so far:

Reference Links

General

Music

...Hosting/streaming video, etc. to come...

Seth Godin: Items in Motion

2025-09-11T07:11:57-07:00

A frog has no trouble grabbing a fast-moving fly in midair.

But the same fly, sitting on a leaf, is safe, essentially invisible to the frog.

We’re a lot like frogs sometimes. We choose to pay attention to things when they’re changing, not when they feel normal.

If you want something to get noticed, move it.

And if you want to improve your situation, try looking for things that aren’t moving, but could be improved.

Seth is a master at aphorisms like this, writing little gifts that I read and say (if only inside my head), "Ohhh!"

Colour Scheming

2025-09-09T21:15:18-07:00

As I gradually rebuild this website up from nothing, it amused me to have no stylesheet for a while, and just see black text on a white background with blue links that turn purple when you visit them. Talk about a throwback!

But now it’s time to add some colour. And I’m not a designer, but I know what I like. I’ll probably alter and update the palette plenty as I go, and then I’ll experiment with making this an “evergreen” post that I keep updating, but for now here are some resources¹ I’ve found useful:

Siddharth11/Colorful: A curated list of awesome resources to choose your next color scheme
Shadows of Regret Color Palette - ColorDrop – This site has a bunch of nice palettes, but I particularly liked the name of this one. I might try it out for that reason alone.
Coolors - The super fast color palettes generator! – this is fun to play with.
Reasonable Colors – I appreciate the name, and that it’s an open-source resource. Currently using some complementary colours suggested here.

Among other things, a post like this on my site lets me close all the bloody tabs I keep open on my laptop, because now I have the pages linked here for future reference… ↩

nb

2025-08-14T21:10:13-05:00

nb is a command line and local web note‑taking, bookmarking, archiving, and knowledge base application

I came across this the other day while researching plaintext/CLI-based workflows, and my eyes bugged out of my head like in those old cartoons where a wolf sees a pretty woman¹—this looks like exactly the tool I’ve been looking for.

I’ve spent the last few days migrating notes from various other apps into plain text files managed by nb, and I’m really enjoying it so far. Will no doubt have more to report here.

My head turned into a steam whistle, &c. ↩

Just Posting

2025-08-14T21:02:04-05:00

It’s so funny, all the ways I come up with to hold myself back from just making stuff and sharing it with the world, to wit:

I’ve written, or drafted and half-written, lots of posts over the last many, many years that I never posted on my various blogs at the various times I maintained them. And it’s always felt like “cheating” to back date a post: like, publish it today with a published date in 2020—because that’s when I wrote it.

I came across a note from someone, and I wish I remembered who so I could thank them, pointing out how silly this is. After all, I did write the thing then, and there’s no reason not to share it now, and provide the context of the date when it was written.

So I’m going to do more of that.

It Is No Great Hardship

2021-06-13T13:02:00-07:00

I often feel like a failure. But you can’t fail at your life. The pain comes from our need for narrative: you tell yourself a story of how your life is gonna go, and then, when it refuses to go that way, you hate it. Or you hate the world. Or you hate yourself.

We want life to be a story, but life is just a series of things that happen to you until they stop.

I’m still here, and still working towards finishing my first novel. After spending a lot of 2021 not doing the second draft—indeed, thinking my priority should be finding someone else to finish writing it, and then deciding, “No, I need to do this myself,” and then spending a few more months not fucking doing anything... the last few weeks have been productive. And maybe it’s only working because this time the chart on my wall where I’m recording how many scenes I edited each day was made by my girlfriend, and that’s just enough external accountability to keep me going, I don’t know.

I said to her today that trying to figure yourself out, figure out why you’re not doing the work, is a great way to avoid doing the work.

Even now, I’m composing this instead of working on the draft of the novel in the application window behind this one.

And earlier it became very important to vacuum my floor. And now I’m going to throw a load of laundry in.

And hopefully I’ll edit a couple scenes today, but boy is it painful and boringly, tediously predictable to spend the entire goddamn day psychically flogging myself for Not Writing The Novel until I finally can’t take it anymore and get some work done.

Just read that description again. This is no way to live. But it’s the way I’m living.

Shrug.

Seems like it doesn’t matter if you “know” something, like that you’d be better off just sitting down at 7 AM or 10 AM every morning and writing, so you could just enjoy the rest of your day without being crushed under psychic weight, knowing that simple solution somehow doesn’t translate into implementing it. Or, having implemented it, sticking with it for more than a couple weeks before ending up back here, in the world of the Cenobites.

If it seems hopelessly melodramatic to go on and on this way about inventing worlds with my imagination… I agree with you. Perseverating about this is boring. It’s like how every conversation for the past two years has ended up being about COVID in one way or another, and it’s not even fearsome or hopeless anymore, it’s just… fucking tiresome, isn’t it? Like, it would be a relief to think about anything else for more than a couple minutes.

And yeah, the novel thing is like that. It would be great to just not give so much of a shit.

Or, really, it would be great if the giving so much of a shit translated into disciplined and consistent work, instead of all this teenage sobbing and gnashing of teeth.

Ohhhhkay, enough of that. See how boring it is? Being ever-swirling around a whirlpool of angst is de rigueur when you’re sixteen but two dozen years later hopefully you’ve learned some coping strategies for the howling void. I guess writing this is one of them… I wonder if it helps.

To paraphrase Seth Godin on David Perell’s podcast: “Just do it” seems trite, but if you interpret “just” as “merely”, now we’re getting somewhere: merely do it, without all the dramatizing, without all the fear and anxiety about what it means, or says about you, that you are or are not writing a book…

Merely do it. It’s not that hard, really. It’s just you don’t wanna.

I don’t wanna.

Whoever those people are who “just want to write”, well, I’m happy for them. I don’t know what supreme being I pissed off in my discorporeal state in the no-place before time began, but for some reason I’m super driven to “write novels” but don’t actually want to write very much, and I just have to live with that. I guess.

A more upbeat way to look at this is to take responsibility: instead of thinking of myself as cursed, consider that I’m making a choice to put myself in this position. I guess it’s possible my life would be a flaming wreck if I didn’t make myself write a novel, if I let myself off the hook, but let’s say it wouldn’t be. Then I’m doing this really difficult thing, but I’m choosing to do it.

Lots of people don’t have a choice, you know? I’m not in a prison camp, I’m just choosing to do a thing I happen to find really hard to do.

That’s not exactly the end of the world.

You’ve got to do something with your life, and, one argument goes, you might as well do something hard. Because why not?

But there are plenty of days where you don’t feel like it. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in various of his books, interpreted by me as a way to dismiss a painful truth that you can’t really do anything about, it’s just the way it is:

So it goes. Hi ho. Poo-tee-weet!

I don’t know if that’s Buddhism, or Stoicism, or neither, or what. But if something makes you feel bad and it’s not going anywhere, an alternative to going to war with yourself is just to say, “Oh, well,” and keep on living your life. Because what’s the alternative?

About Peloton Guy

2020-12-21T08:51:00-07:00

I was thinking about the Peloton guy who drinks water out of his hand: Daring Fireball: Somebody Tell This Guy He Can Just Buy a Cup to Keep Upstairs

And how I’d read about it through the lens of people mocking him, and someone said somewhere that he doesnt like being made fun of, and isn’t this rich tech CEO an unself-aware nutcase like all of them are?

And maybe so, but today I thought about the article and it inclined me to drink a bunch of water first thing in the morning (from a cup). But more than that, it reminded me of a podcast episode I did¹ called “Give Yourself Permission to Be Weird”, and how people who do crazy things like start companies are weird. And I want to be weird. It’s good to be weird.

Not to impugn the journalistic capabilities of Dan McQuade, but articles like this write themselves, don’t they? Is Drinking 40 Sips Of Water With Your Hand, Like A Cat, Every Morning “More Efficient” Than Using A Glass? An Investigation - Defector

“Look at this crazy person”

Only… while the rest of the world is spending their time making fun of this weird habit, and maybe dude is really upset by that, fact is he’s living a life a lot of readers of both Defector and Daring Fireball wish they were living (or think they do)—otherwise no one would bother writing articles about him.

Wanting something but not being willing, or being afraid, to do the things that would get you that thing is a lot of what stands in our way. It’s not that we don’t have time or don’t have ideas: our brains are afraid of something and that something is being found out, being found weird, not fitting in.

Don’t misunderstand me: the point isn’t you should drink water out of your hand, and if you think that’s my point your brain is lying to protect you from the truth. The truth is this:

If you do what everyone else does, you get what everyone else gets. Maybe that’s fine (probably, in fact). But maybe not.

That was the seanwes podcast, which I co/guest-hosted for a time. Sadly no longer online. —ed. ↩

Which #'s Are Recyclable in Vancouver?

2020-07-19T19:50:07-07:00

I never remember what plastics I can recycle and what I can’t; this is a handy reminder.

The Sopranos: Definitive Explanation of the Final Scene Annotated Guide

2020-07-05T18:26:02-07:00

I’m a huge fan of people who dive into arbitrary corners of pop culture in insane amounts of detail.

Therefore, I couldn’t be happier to have found this deep dive into the ending of The Sopranos, inspired by the discussion of the scene found in episode 462 of The Incomparable podcast.

Bless all these nerds. ❤️

This Enlightening Map Shows the Literal Meaning of Every Country's Name

2020-06-20T16:14:45-07:00

This is cool. Coming to you from The Village. 😎

Direct link to scalable image

(via Tim Ferriss's 5-Bullet Friday newsletter)

Fragile, by Nic Askew

2020-06-20T16:09:43-07:00

our lives are
held together with
thoughts of where
we might be tomorrow.
And of disappointed
yesterdays.

(via Tim Ferriss's 5-Bullet Friday newsletter)

Coding C# in Vim

2020-06-15T21:18:52-07:00

I've been looking for guides for how to do .NET development in Vim, because Vim has long appealed to me for a variety of reasons too esoteric to get into right now. And, despite it being what I'm using to write this post, I'm hungry to get away from Visual Studio Code and its "I'm secretly Javascript running on Chrome don't tell anybody"; I mean, I've used WAY worse web-simulacra-of-native-apps (I'm glaring at you, Descript), but still. Code is a little janky (for some reason, File > New Window doesn't seem to work anymore) and I don't need my text editor to swallow 2GB of RAM when I'm not using it.

ANYWAY, I'm bookmarking this article because it looks helpful. Actually, Rudism.com just looks all over like the kind of site I want to have. So, also bookmarked for inspiration.

A Complete Guide To Mechanical Keyboards

2020-06-14T19:44:10-07:00

Someday. Yes, someday. Someday I'm going to spend a lot of money on a mechanical keyboard. ...Probably this one. This guide is a good quick-reference that summarizes some of the many, many, ridiculous number of options available. 😂

W.E.B. Du Bois on the Most Important Thing to Remember

2020-05-22T19:00:03-07:00

“The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.”

— W.E.B. Du Bois

(via @patrickrhone)

Please Print (A Journaling Rant)

2020-05-19T22:30:03-07:00

Great little essay by Patrick Rhone, making the argument against relying on a piece of software to hold your journal:

The history of computing has copious evidence to back me up on that bold statement. The evidence shows that Day One (who I will note bills themselves as a “journal for life”) will likely be long gone in 20 years (Go ahead and bookmark this post and come see me then if I’m wrong).

Maybe when the company dies they’ll give you an exit plan to save your work or maybe they won’t.

Day One is a great app, but I've been wanting to move away from it for a long time. Partly to get out from under one more silo—right now, my journal is in their app, on their servers... it doesn't feel under my control.

I'd rather have whatever I write be in plain text—like the source of this post that you're reading. Even then, being able to read write I wrote decades from now depends on the bits that make up this post persisting, being available, being readable... and the history of computing has not borne out the likelihood of that.

Couple things I don't have an obvious replacement for:

Ease of putting photos into Day One entries
Geolocation - I like knowing where I was when I wrote something down

Neither of those are insurmountable, even in a hardcopy journal! The lure of convenience keeps me tied to an app. Hopefully not until it's too late to leave.

Half Kneeling Overhead Press

2020-05-15T17:24:38-07:00

I've added this to my workouts to start building the strength and stability I'll need to do full overhead presses eventually. Bookmarking for ease of reference.

Getting Up and Running With F# in Visual Studio Code on macOS

2020-05-13T20:34:44-07:00

Setting up Visual Studio Code for F#

Cool: you can open a Terminal in VSCode with ^ + `
Do I need to install an extension to use F#? Syntax colouring is built in, looks like
Let’s try creating an FSX script file
- Ok, I can do that, it has syntax highlighting, but I have no way to, you know, evaluate the scriptfile
- Let’s see how you install F# in the modern .NET Core world…
- I’m pretty sure I already have .NET Core installed via Homebrew
- Yup, got the dotnet-sdk cask
There’s the ionide-f# extension, but its website feels outdated, like it talks about needing Mono to get F#, which I’m pretty sure isn’t true. I want to do the most minimal and most up-to-date thing
Ok, this Microsoft doc says “Ionide will generate .NET Framework F# projects, not dotnet core, which can have cross-platform compatibility issues. If you are running on Linux or OSX, a simpler way to get started is to use the command-line tools.”
- That links here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/get-started/get-started-command-line
- Which talks about creating a solution and project, I just want to run a script
- Good old searching for dev info on things that change rapidly: everything you find is out of date 🙄
Ah, dotnet --help includes “Additional commands from bundled tools”, which includes fsi, but fsi is not a command on my path currently. So I have to figure out how to execute it… (I wonder if Homebrew Cask installed it, but only put dotnet in my path…)
Ohhh… the first post in this thread inadvertently demonstrates that you use it like this: dotnet fsi 😏
When I run it, this message appears:

> Failed to install ctrl-c handler - Ctrl-C handling will not be available. Error was:
        Could not load file or assembly 'Mono.Posix, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=0738eb9f132ed756'. The system cannot find the file specified.

Nonetheless, if I write printfn "Hellow World!";;, it obediently prints it, and its evaluation that val it : unit = ()
From here, we should be able to just provide the filename of an FSX file to FSI, and it’ll run it. Let’s try
> dotnet fsi ~/dev/dotnet-projects/fsharp/test.fsx
Despite that error message up there, hitting ^C did indeed terminate the interactive prompt
Now let’s try that command above to run the script
Yup, it prints Hello World! Success! 🤩
Ah, from the FSharp tutorial I linked above, you can run commands from the interactive prompt by prefixing them with #, e.g. #quit quits the prompt
Ok, cool: I can write scratch code in an FSX file and then run it at the built-in terminal. This will come in useful as I read the book version of FSharpForFunAndProfit

Intellisense

It looks to me like this is what you need the Ionide extension for VSCode for. Let’s try installing it and see if it does anything to my FSX file
Ionide-fsharp - “This extension is recommended based on files you recently opened”, I reckon that’s a good sign.
- Its last update was six days ago, which is also a good sign
Ah, I have a little button in the upper-right of the tab bar that lets me run the script or send to FSI. When I try to run script, it opens the terminal and says “fsharpi: command not found”, so evidently it’s trying to use some runner that I don’t have 🤔
Not sure how to get it to show me Intellisense errors, either. Might only work on files inside the typical .NET Solution/Project structure?
Annoying: There are a set of commands added to the VSCode command bar prefixed with F#:, but if you type F#: into the bar, it ignores the non-alphanumeric characters and finds every fucking command with an F in it, and of course the F#, perhaps because they’re newest, are all at the bottom of the list 🙄
Intellisense is clearly not working, because I wrote the word “inference” in a comment, declared a value i, and when I typed i elsewhere (to assign the value as one of the values in a tuple), VSCode’s default Intellisense helpfully suggested “inference” instead of the, you know, actual symbol…
Well, let’s try creating a project from the command bar and see what Ionide does with it
It complains there’s no open folder. True! Let’s open ~/dev/dotnet-projects/fsharp
I wonder if it can’t evaluate my file because of the missing fsharpi
Ooookay: the New Project thingy asked for a folder name and a project name and then said it succeeded, but I don’t see a new folder or project anywhere that I’d expect…
The F#: Get Help command does sweet fuck all
Maybe I should restart Visual Studio?
Nah that didn’t make a difference
- This extension’s lack of feedback is frustrating. It just doesn’t work and doesn’t seem to indicate why
This troubleshooting section has some things to try
- this suggests I need to install mono…

Time Passes...

Getting F# Projects Working

Get Started with F# in Visual Studio Code - Microsoft Docs looks like a promising walkthrough
I already have Ionide installed in VSCode (see above), so let’s see if I can just create a project on the CLI and load it
Cool, that’s working. I’ve got an Ionide icon in the sidebar now that shows me the solution explorer; looks like Intellisense works!
Nice: the scripting example works, too. If I save a file as .fsx (I’m saving it in the project’s directory, I don’t know if this is required, or if it’ll parse any FSX file)
- I just tested it: it parses an FSX on my Desktop just fine 👍🏼
Sweet: I now have a programming environment I can use to learn more about F# and write some useful programs with it.

Do. The. Work.

2020-05-06T20:31:22-07:00

Love this brief post from Rick LePage, especially the bit from Seinfeld. And the bit about the work being hard, and that being by necessity and design. It goes with something I've been thinking a lot lately: that my mood and self-image and maybe mental health in general improve a lot when I do the work and degrade rapidly when I don't.

Also, an apparently-different recent interview with Seinfeld (guess he's being interviewed a lot recently?) produced this, quoted in James Clear's 3-2-1 Newsletter for April 23: "The right way is the hard way."

Sein knows what's up.

(via Daring Fireball)

Just CLI Things: Changing Directories (cd) in Linux/Unix as Superuser

2020-04-20T20:34:55-07:00

I always try to do sudo cd /some/restricted/dir and it doesn’t work and I always forget why.

sudo cd won't work because the cd command is built into the shell. So you are saying become root and then run this command. You become root and then the command after sudo is searched for but there is no cd command to find.

The method to use is to switch to the user that owns the directory. Permission 700 is meant as "owner can read, write and execute".

So if root owns the directory sudo -i, password and then cd {dir} is the only correct method. If someone else owns the directory you can still use the 1st method but can also change to that user with su {username} and then use cd as that user.

In summary: cd isn’t a “command”, so you can’t pass it to sudo. Instead, use su to become an appropriate user and then use the shell to change directories.

Hellboy 🔥

2020-04-05T16:49:48-07:00

It gets complicated.

I wanted to read some Hellboy comics, after watching the first movie last year¹.

So, the other day, I got myself some comics and tore through the first half of the main Hellboy set of stories. I usually like reading my comics in print, in trade paperback or hardcover; I can’t be bothered to keep up with those little monthly issues, and it’s not economical, anyway, and, I mean, I’m still just getting into Hellboy, which started in the ‘90s, and Sandman, which I first learned about when my best friend was reading it back in high school (and it started years before that).

So anyway, I love nothing more than a nice, heavy trade-paperback collection jammed with beautiful art, but right now I don’t particularly want to have things delivered to me if I don’t need to (save the delivery capacity for people who need important things urgently, and reduce the need to make contact with other people), and it turns out the Hellboy books are really cheap on the Canadian Kindle store right now: the Omnibus editions—the thick, comprehensive collections I prefer—are like six-and-a-half bucks.

Heck, a month ago, when I could still go to coffee shops, I was spending that on lattes a day. Might as well load up on comics, and reading them on my iPad is almost as pleasant an experience as reading the real thing (and the iPad never flips shut and loses your page 😏).

The main Hellboy storyline is easy enough to track in the big collections: Omnibus editions 1-4 cover it beginning to end, with an assortment of short stories thrown in. Then there are two more collections: The Complete Short Stories, volumes 1 and 2, which have a bunch more short stories (as the name implies), and that’s that.

Simple! I’ll buy six collections, and that’s all the Hellboy, and then I can… I can…

Uh-oh.

Glancing at the fictional character biography of Hellboy on Wikipedia, I can see that the last Omnibus Collection, “Hellboy in Hell”… only carries the plot most of the way to the end. So, on the one hand… I’m just been spoilered, boo-hoo. On the other hand… where is the rest of this story told?? I must know.

I MUST KNOW!

So, let’s click this link to the Wikipedia article “List of Hellboy comics”…

…

As Hellboy himself is fond of saying, “Oh, crap.”

Turns out there are multiple whole other series! The principal—and most important to this gripping narrative—is the BPRD. Looking at the chronological history, it seems like at least part of this was written and released in conjunction with the last half or third of the main Hellboy arc. I haven’t looked into it yet—I’m doing that next—but I assume it follows the adventures of Hellboy’s former companions in the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence after he quits the company, and (judging from that spoiler at the end of the Fictional Character Biography) after the final-seeming events of Hellboy in Hell.

Well.

Now I have a bunch more comics to buy. But first I have to figure out which ones I need to read to fill in the rest of the story, and in what order!

I cannot imagine a more satisfying task into which to sink a couple hours of time. 🤓

Perhaps once I’m done I’ll have a somewhat comprehensive “Hellboy Reader” I can share, for the next doomed soul that follows in my wake.

Though, having said that, I bet if I search the internet such a thing already exists… 🤔

(Hey, look!)

No, not the Hellboy that came out last year, the first one, with Ron Perlman, which came out in 2004; I just saw that last year². ↩
I ignored the remake, because they remake everything, but now that I know a bit more about the storyline, and I know it’s David Harbour playing Hellboy, and now that I’ve seen the first season of Stranger Things and know who David Harbour is... the new movie may well be worth a watch, if I’m not totally exhausted with Hellboy by the end of this adventure, which, read on. ↩

MegaZeux still exists!

2020-03-24T20:30:39-07:00

OMG, you guys… MegaZeux still exists!

I used to fool around with this ASCII-art game/game editor 25 years ago! It was a new, more-advanced version of ZZT, which might technically still exist, too.

A week off + quarantine has made me nostalgic for the games of my youth, and today I remembered MZX… and found it. 🤯🤓

I feel like I "should" be making things instead of consuming them. At least playing old Nintendo games makes me itch to try developing my own, instead of just sinking hours into the couch.

We'll see if that itch leads anywhere.

Setting Up DropShare With a VPS

2020-03-22T19:19:26-07:00

I want to switch away from CloudApp to a host/domain under my control, and DropShare looks like a great alternative, because it lets you pick a back-end.

They have instructions for setting up SCP/SSH using your own server via nginx on DigitalOcean. I’ve already got danj.ca running on Apache on Linode, so I should be able to replicate the same.

Another alternative is to use S3-compatible object storage which, again, Linode offers and I could potentially use by mirroring DropShare’s DigitalOcean instructions. Object storage might be a better move because it comes with CDN and takes away the overhead of administering a server, but we’ll see. I’ll try just putting this on my web server first…

Instructions

How to set up Dropshare with a DigitalOcean Droplet – Dropshare User Guide

Requirements

I already have the server and web server running, I just need to add:

A VirtualHost, to associate a subdomain to the folder where the shared files will be hosted
A user account for DropShare to use; by their instructions, the hosted files go in this user’s home directory, but I suppose you could host them somewhere else as long as it’s available to the user account / web server
An SSH keypair for DropShare to use to authenticate as the DropShare user

Adding the site to Apache

Pretty sure I want the site’s document root alongside that for www.danj.ca, i.e. /var/www/dropshare/
So let’s create that folder with the same subfolders as my other site has
> sudo mkdir -p /var/www/dropshare/{backups,log,public_html}
Now let’s create the Apache config for the site
My intention is to use share.danj.ca as the public domain for this site
Let’s start by copying www.danj.ca’s config
> sudo cp www.danj.ca.conf dropshare.conf
Actually, wait. I should name this after the site I want to use, not the incidental fact I’ll use DropShare to interact with it!
Let’s replace “dropshare” above with “share.danj.ca”
Ok, added share.danj.ca.conf with contents copied from www.danj.ca.conf, but all domain/folder references updated accordingly
Kept the Rewrite rule that I believe forces https…
Now we need to add a link in the sites-enabled directory
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/share.danj.ca.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/share.danj.ca.conf

Set up a user for dropshare

sudo useradd dropshare
…Oops, should have used useradd -m, he didn’t get a home directory 😛
Ok, created the directory by hand and made the dropshare user its owner… I wonder if I have to configure something to actually make /home/dropshare associated as the user’s homedir… but we’ll see
Give the dropshare user ownership on the share.danj.ca/public_html directory
> sudo chown dropshare:www-data /var/www/share.danj.ca/public_html
Oh, by the way, it looks like this is how you assign a user’s homedir: sudo usermod -d /home/dropshare dropshare, so let’s do that
Usermod reported “no changes”, so I guess it was fine

Set up the domain

In Hover, we need to add a CNAME so that requests to share.danj.ca go to the server
If I recall correctly, I think we can set up a CNAME from share.danj.ca to danj.ca, and Apache should do the right thing, but I could be missing a step. Let’s put a test index.html in share’s public_html dir, and that’ll let us know if we’re finding it.
Hmm, actually right now share.danj.ca in a web browser just sends me to http://danj.ca; I guess there’s a wildcard subdomain record?
Ok, created the CNAME, let’s see what happens… might need to wait for DNS to propagate
Ah, reviewing some docs, I was reminded I need to restart Apache after adding server configs
- Now share.danj.ca gives me a certificate error, presumably because it’s not configured for SSL, so it might be working
- Also note that now code.danj.ca (an existing CNAME) leads to an empty directory listing… what’s that showing me? 🤔

Sidebar: Adding domains to an SSL certificate

Instructions: https://certbot.eff.org/docs/using.html#re-creating-and-updating-existing-certificates
Ran > sudo certbot certonly --cert-name danj.ca -d danj.ca,www.danj.ca,share.danj.ca
Selected Apache plugin as the challenge mechanism, confirmed I wanted to add the new domain, that’s all it took
Oh yes, and restart the web server. Gotta remember that.
Ok, now share.danj.ca redirects me to the website at www.danj.ca, it doesn’t seem like my Apache config is working as intended

Fixing the Apache config

Still noticing that if you go to share.danj.ca or danj.ca, the hyperlinks to all articles have that domain. I guess because they’re all relative links. But I’d really like to force the site to always direct you to www…
Ok. Confirmed that pinging share.danj.ca basically returns danj.ca and pings the correct IP address. That’s a sanity check done. Now let’s look at the Apache configs again
Interesting: Added a test index file to the share.danj.ca document root. When I go to an undefined subdomain, like scrod.danj.ca, I get served that file. If I actually go to share.danj.ca, I end up on the www.danj.ca homepage… Same with code.danj.ca
Hypothesis: I was gonna say CNAMEs are taking me to danj.ca, but both code and share are CNAMEs yet yield different results
- Now, the difference is, share is on the SSL cert…
- Wait, the share apache config also has the redirect rules I copied from www to apply https…
- Ok, I think the share.danj.ca VirtualHost is working just fine. But when it redirects to https, then we end up in the VirtualHost config in www.danj.ca-le-ssl.conf (because it handles *:443), which of course serves us www.danj.ca/public_html
- So I think if I add a 443 VirtualHost for share.danj.ca, I’ll have it made. Now, it looks like LetsEncrypt/certbot added that SSL config file for me, but for share.danj.ca, I’m gonna try just adding the SSL VirtualHost to the existing share.danj.ca config file
Yup, that did it! Now share.danj.ca redirects to https://share.danj.ca and serves up the share index file

Letting DropShare communicate with the server

We need to generate an SSH keypair for DropShare to use to connect as the dropshare user
Did that locally on my Mac, using the instructions from DropShare
I remember there’s a clever way to copy an SSH pubkey up to the server, let’s see if I can find it…
Ah, I was thinking of ssh-copy-id, but that assumes you’re adding a key for the user with whom you’re logging in. That’s not what I’m doing: I want to SSH into the server as my own account, but add a key for the dropshare account
It occurs to me I can do this with scp
Ah, no, I want to append the contents of the pubkey to authorized_keys, like this:
> ssh user@danj.ca "cat >> /home/dropshare/.ssh/authorized_keys" < ~/.ssh/dropshare.pub
…Ah, the file doesn’t exist. Can’t append to it if it doesn’t exist.
Logged in and created the .ssh folder and auth keys file for dropshare. For reference, giving it these permissions: this comment
Let’s try this one more time via SSH (we’ll need sudo, cos I can’t write to the other user’s auth keys file…)
- Ah, it’s not clear how to do this via sudo. Fuck it, just copy the pubkey to the pasteboard and I’ll paste it into the authorized_keys file while SSH-ed in, let Terminal do the work. 😛
Ok, done.
Let’s test and see if it works: ssh -i ~/.ssh/dropshare dropshare@danj.ca
- (The i switch defines precisely which key to use, otherwise it would default to my key (actually I think the dropshare key is the only one there, but let’s just be explicit.))
Boom, that worked. Ok, now dropshare can get in to the server

Setting up DropShare on the Mac

Set up new SCP over SSH connection
Hostname: share.danj.ca
Username: dropshare
Password: SSH passphrase
SSH Key Pair: dropshare/dropshare.pub
Upload Path: /var/www/share.danj.ca/public_html
URL to Path: https://share.danj.ca/
Successfully tested!
Uploaded a screenshot… DropShare’s annotation tool is MUCH more clunky than CloudApp’s… alas
- Ahh, but you can configure DropShare to use external annotation tools! Gonna play with that!
- One of the supported apps is CleanShot, also included in SetApp (which is how I’m getting access to DropShare), so there’s a natural choice… though it also supports Preview.app too, let’s try that first.
  - Ah, ok, so it hands off the screenshot to Preview, then you use the DropShare Share Extension in Preview to upload the image
  - A slight annoyance here is you have to dismiss Preview (and tell it you don’t want to save the screenshot) when you’re done
  - Let’s try CleanShot, too
    - Oh yeah. That’s a LOT better¹. CleanShot has nice annotation tools much more like CloudApp’s, and you just drag an icon up to DropShare’s menu bar icon, which uploads the shot and dismisses CleanShot. I think this is my workflow. ✅

Next Up

I think the next thing I want to do is set up YOURLS on my server, and set DropShare to use it. I suspect I’ll have to stop using www.danj.ca as an alias for danj.ca, and make them into two separate sites. But that should be fine, as the canonical URLs for my website use www.danj.ca anyway. danj.ca is perfect for short URLs…

(Update after a few months of using CleanShot): CleanShot is great. It's got an easy-to-use screen recorder built right in that lets you capture video or animated GIFs, great for demonstrations. It also has a feature that lets you quickly hide your desktop icons, which I used in haste whilse sharing my screen on a video call the other day. Thus far my only complaint about CleanShot is it doesn't seem to support emoji in its text annotation which is a big 👎🏼. ↩

Famous Speeches: A List of the Greatest Speeches of All Time

2020-03-17T20:26:40-07:00

Nice collection by James Clear. Reading material.

...Point off for incorrectly hyphenating "all time" in the title, though. 😏

The “Care” in “Self Care”

2020-03-17T19:57:17-07:00

Highlights/Notes:

After I wrote the item “do something nice for a friend” – because being a good friend and having good friends is important to me. I completed the pair with the item, “do something nice for myself”. A secondary thought, but still, a thought.

This understanding started reading Burnout (a book that affected me so profoundly I have lost track of the number of women I have bought it for). Burnout is a symptom of the patriarchy.

I wonder where that conclusion comes from (not that I think she’s wrong). Guess I should read Burnout... 🤔

The Internet Archive: 'Our Social Media is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix?'

2020-03-17T19:48:31-07:00

A lot of good potential resources for IndieWeb/decentralized/non-siloed social media tools in here.

A Day Without the iPhone

2020-03-16T20:33:35-07:00

Well, half a day, really.

Yesterday, I wrote about how I took a week off of wearing my Apple Watch, to see what it would be like to pry myself away from the technology that rules my life. While I was writing that, I had the idea to toss my iPhone in a drawer for a whole day.

I tried that out this morning. I put my phone in the drawer until noon, at which point I figured I'd check my messages and such for about ten minutes and then put it back for the rest of the day.

Well, I didn't put it back. I dove back in to what I normally do when my phone is ever by my side: bounce around the various apps that I've cleverly gathered in a "Distractions" folder, and listen to podcasts (also did a little Wikipedia binging).

Okay, fine. I'm not surprised it wasn't easy to stay away. Observations about the morning, though:

It felt good to not feel like I always needed sound in my ears or a screen before my eyes in order to be okay.
There were indeed many moments where I felt at loose ends because... what was I going to do if not look at my phone? The temptation was to fiddle around on my Mac, or, what I also did a bit of today, read a paperback book, which is a nice change of pace (I read a fair amount, but it's almost always on my phone).

In yesterday's article I talked about keeping my watch, and I will say that having the watch does make me feel better leaving my phone at home when I go out—at least there's still, you know, something. I don't know why that should feel important; further analysis required.

I'd like to get in the habit of taking my nice long walks without my phone. Without headphones, without music, without a podcast, just me and the world.

Maybe I can learn to fill those empty moments where I would otherwise check my phone with creative pursuits. More writing. More thinking. Imagine that!

A Week Without the Apple Watch

2020-03-15T21:18:45-07:00

After closing my rings every day for over 200 days, I stuck my Apple Watch in a drawer for a week, to see if I'd be happier without it running my life.

I've been wearing it again for a few days now, and... I think I'm keeping it.

It's occurred to me lately how new things—let's focus on technologies for now—come into our lives, and quickly become part of the fabric. How hard it is to imagine life without a smartphone, even though I somehow lived the first 25 years of my life in a world where they didn’t exist…

That’s part of it, though: they didn’t exist. Is it easier to live without something when there’s no expectation you’ll have it?

I’m curious about this. And I’m tempted to stick my phone in a drawer, but I may have to start with a day instead of a week¹.

Back to the watch: why did I want to take a break from it in the first place?

I got the Apple Watch as a gift in April 2018. I’ve worn it pretty much every day, for the entire time I’m awake, since then.
I’ve gotten in the habit of closing the three rings on the Watch every day. For reference, that means:
- Burn at least 450 “active” calories.
- Exercise for at least 30 minutes, where “exercise” is based on movement and heart rate.
- Stand up and move around for a few minutes in each of twelve hours.
I occasionally felt resentment to this “need” to close my rings.
- And, alongside that, this distasteful feeling like physical activity didn’t “count” if I didn’t have the watch on to acknowledge it.
The watch uses haptic feedback² to tell you when you get notifications on your phone. You can of course control many aspects of when and how you receive these.
- I would sometimes find the notifications annoying, in particular when someone sent a lot of text messages in quick succession, and the watch would rapidly tap me on the wrist six times within a few seconds.

What did I hope to gain from not wearing the watch?

Feeling like I could be physically active without the half-conscious tension that it had to be measured and logged.
Eliminate the need—the addiction—to not break the streak of closing my rings. There’s an argument to be made that the desire to keep a streak going is an important tool in forming good habits, and that’s fine… but the downside is feeling like you’re a servant of the mechanism, instead of the other way around.
Being less distracted by notifications as I go about my day.
From a fashion standpoint, not feeling like I always had to have the thing strapped to my wrist.
- Sometimes I’d rather have nothing on my wrist.
- I sometimes think about getting other, non-smart watches as accessory pieces, but then I’d have to spend part of the day without the Apple Watch measuring my activity…

Part of the reason for the experiment was the desire to take something out of my life to see if I really wanted it, or, thinking it’s a sensible default to not have an extra “thing” unless it really adds value to your life.

What did I find during the week with no watch?

I believe—without having measured—that I was still at the same level of activity. The desire to get outside and take a walk every day is still there, even when I’m not measuring it.
I found a negative side-effect of not having notifications on my wrist is that I would check my phone more often, because maybe someone sent me a text message. When I wore the watch, I didn’t feel as much urge to do this, because I knew if someone messaged me I’d see it on my wrist.

Why didn’t I sell the watch or throw it in the lake?

I’m pretty sure I do want to keep the watch. I enjoy the convenience of being able to do various things (set timers, control the playback of music/podcasts on my phone) from my wrist, I have not yet been bothered or found myself overly distracted by the notifications (and I can always selectively turn them off), and I have been enjoying the little burst of satisfaction that comes from logging a walk and closing my rings.

Ultimately, I think the watch is adding value.

What changes do I want to make?

I would like to feel less obsessive with closing my rings every day without fail. I would like to feel less like I need to constantly wear the watch while I’m awake. Perhaps I would like to put it on when I exercise, or for certain parts of the day, but I would like to feel okay with just not wearing it sometimes.
- Actually, that’s the real takeaway: I want to feel comfortable with not always wearing the watch.
Regarding fashion, I am inclined to buy some nicer straps (I just have the default black rubber/plastic one that came with the watch) to make it more of a fashion accessory. Combined with being more comfortable not wearing the watch, this lets me be more versatile with fashion, which makes me happy.

I want to do experiments like this more often. Instead of assuming that the way I do things is the way they must remain, change things up on a regular basis and see what happens. Again, this requires a willingness to break “streaks” without totally giving up the habits that the streaks help maintain. I think I’ll be happier over time with this sort of regular reflection and experimentation.

If you do similar little lifestyle experiments, I’d be happy to hear about them.

In fact, I’m going to set a reminder to do that tomorrow. Let’s see how we go. ↩
i.e. It vibrates in a way that feels like it’s tapping you on the wrist. ↩

Justin Baldoni: Why I'm Done Trying to Be 'Man Enough'

2020-03-08T19:13:52-07:00

Everything he says about what it's like to be brought up male—the lack of connection with our own emotions, the devaluing¹ of femininity, both in ourselves and in women—it all strikes a chord with me.

And really that's not-strong-enough a word but a better one escapes me at the moment. ↩

'How Do I Lose Weight?' is the Wrong Question

2020-03-08T18:48:43-07:00

Like in most other areas of my life, I've been privileged to come at the question of body weight without undue stress or anxiety: I'm male, and naturally skinny, so "lose weight" has never been a thing I felt the need to do.

Having good problems isn't the same as not having problems, however, and my problem has always been the opposite: I've always felt too skinny, not strong enough, and had the various other ailments that accompany that, like a rounded upper back (and generally bad posture)¹.

Lifting weights has a made a big difference to me, and this article explains why.

I have been in a healthy weight range all my life, and had this exact problem: I felt that I looked overweight, I hated how my body looked and more importantly felt like I didn’t understand why it did anything it did. I felt like if I ate even a little bit more than barely any food, I gained like three pounds each time. I only seemed to get fatter if I ate how much a normal person was supposed to, yet no one was about to help me with the weight loss I felt like I desperately needed to pursue.

Reverse all of the quantities in that statement (over with under, a little bit with a lot, fatter with thinner, loss with gain) and I could have written it.

My frustration was, even after I started lifting weights in university, I never really knew what I was doing. I eventually found a program² a few years ago which made the difference by being one of the few resources I've ever seen actually geared towards the skinny guy who wants to gain in a healthy way³. Quoting from the article again:

Lifting weights was a fit for me because it makes resting and recovering equally as important as training. It lays extremely bare for people like me, who struggle to grasp what my body even might be for other than “constant source of resentment," how it all works. Moving and feeling mobile, capable, and energetic is life-changing to me, and these feelings are supported by lifting and getting stronger; getting stronger is supported by eating and resting as well as actually lifting.

Once I had the experience of following a lifting program, with feedback, and measuring how many calories and macronutrients I was taking in, I could move my feelings about my body from vague "this sucks I hate it" to an experimental mindset: "uhoh, I've stopped gaining weight. Let me try adding another 250 calories to my diet."

Regardless of our feelings of inadequacy, we are all, by being human, inheritors of athletic potential. Put another way, we were built for strenuous exercise, and, for most of us, when we feel bad about how our bodies look and function, some combination of exercise and mental work (e.g. therapy) is the answer.

This reminds me of something I'd almost forgotten, which is that some jackass in high school used to call me "Quasimodo" because of my posture. While I don't hold his being a jackass against him—I wasn't necessarily that much better when I was the same age, I shat on people lower than me on the social totem pole in turn—I ought to acknowledge I've had a bit of a complex about my body even if it's not been as severe as others'. Minimizing our own struggles is a problematical reflex. ↩
Yes, that's really what it's called. I am not ashamed. 😂 ↩
For example, most "healthy" guides to nutrition assume you're trying to minimize carb intake, whereas if I want to put on muscle I require ALL OF THE CARBS, thank you very much. ↩

Seth Godin on Building Systems vs. 'Just Try Harder'

2020-03-08T17:15:09-07:00

I always find Seth's posts insightful. And he posts so many of them, and they're so concise... that basically he's a walking example of why writing and publishing every day is the only way to get great at being a writer and a publisher.

This post captures so well why "just try harder not to make mistakes" is a dead end that I just want to quote all of it, but since that's not really how I want the web to work, just a couple highlights before you go read the rest (it's only 416 words):

It seems ridiculous that a surgeon needs to write her name (with a Sharpie) on the limb that she’s about to operate on, but this simple system adjustment means that errors involving working on the wrong limb will go to zero.

In school, we harangue kids to be more careful, and spend approximately zero time teaching them to build better systems instead. We ignore checklists and processes because we’ve been taught that they’re beneath us.

The ego that makes us think we're "above" simple systems for eliminating mistakes is as hardwired a part of our humanity as the imperfect memory.

Letting go of the one lets us solve for the other.

Tim Ferriss on Being Famous

2020-03-07T09:35:12-08:00

This is an excellent—and harrowing—look at the downsides that come with being well-known.

Various measures of "success" in today's world seem to bring some measure of fame along with them—insofar as you have to create content to get people's attention, for a lot of small creators especially, that attention is focused on you.

This quote (and the quotes it includes) sums up how I feel about fame:

During my college years, one of my dorm mate’s dads was a famous Hollywood producer. He once said to me, “You want everyone to know your name and no one to know your face.”

Taking it a step further, we could quote Bill Murray:

I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover most of it. There’s not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job. . . . The only good thing about fame is that I’ve gotten out of a couple of speeding tickets. I’ve gotten into a restaurant when I didn’t have a suit and tie on. That’s really about it.

Being rich would suit me fine. Being rich and famous would be obnoxious, as per Mr. Murray. The worst thing, reading Tim's article, would be being famous without being rich (emphasis mine):

If you don’t have your own ammo, [extortion] can be catastrophic. In other words, if you have more fame than resources, you paint yourself into a vulnerable corner. If you have fewer options and fewer allies, you’ll be attractive to predators.

You might think, "how likely is it that I would be famous at all?" But if you're building an audience on the internet in order to, for example, build an online business... well, this article will tell you about the inevitable downsides that come with an audience that climbs up beyond "tribe" size to "city" size.

I'm going to meditate on this one on the regular, as I try to build any sort of business or brand for myself.

A couple tactical notes:

If you run an email list, using something like ConvertKit or Mailchimp, you have probably needed to provide an address; emails from mailing lists need to contain a postal address for the business as an anti-spam measure (I don't know the source of that specific requirement). Don't use your home address for this. Even if you have a tiny mailing list... all it takes is one unsavoury person signing up. Rent a P.O. Box, if at all possible, or some similar thing in your own jurisdiction.
I've been meaning to get a "virtual" phone number (or more than one), and use it in places that require a phone number instead of my actual mobile. Again, if you catch any level of fame, this becomes far more important. You don't want your contact info logged somewhere that people from the internet can find it, and our existing institutions are notoriously bad at keeping personal info like this private. Best to keep your real information behind a smoke screen as much as possible.

Doubling Down on Instapaper

2020-03-05T21:23:29-08:00

In a similar post a couple months ago, I talked about taking an app I've had for a long time (OmniFocus, in that case) and "doubling down" on it—making it a more regular part of my daily life.

It occurred to me today that Instapaper is another such app. I've used—and paid for—Instapaper since it was Marco Arment's indie app debut. But for the last few years, I have steadily added articles to my Instapaper queue but rarely gone into the app and actually read what was in there.

In this way, it's been similar to OmniFocus: an aspirational graveyard of things I want to do but never get around to doing.

That's a shame, and it could be an argument for abandoning the thing wholesale, but I'd rather turn back to it and try to re-engage. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: this year I'm trying to be less all-or-nothing. Less, "I didn't do this thing I wanted so I'd better quit trying." If something doesn't work, you could toss it in the bin. But an alternative is... to keep trying until it works.

As for Instapaper: I want to build a process around reading things, making notes and annotations on them, and then archiving those (or publishing them!) somewhere, and doing that regularly. Two antipatterns I'm fighting against:

I find things I want to read, but never read them. This is exemplified by having pages open in Safari tabs on my Mac or iPhone for months—months—and never, ever reading them, only to lose them when I reset something.
I read things... and then quickly forget about them, adding them to the background noise of my brain. Sure, some of that stuff gets synthesized, or sloshes around disembodied until one day it generates something interesting... but I'd rather have a system for capturing my thoughts on something as soon as I read it. Like journaling, but for the shorter-form stuff I come across every day.

And there are three types of content that fit nicely into Instapaper:

Articles that people send me links to, or that I otherwise stumble across, on the web
Posts on sites that I subscribe to via RSS, but don't feel like reading in my RSS reader (that's usually long-form stuff, like Ben Thompson's Stratechery)
(This was just pointed out to me today) Email newsletters that I don't actually want to read in my email client. I've been considering setting up a whole separate address just to receive newsletters, to filter them out from all the other stuff that accumulates in my inbox, but shunting those things into Instapaper could be a great alternative

So this suggests a potential process I would like to start doing:

Route all of the three content types above into Instapaper¹
Here's the missing piece: on a regular basis, read the content in my Instapaper queue!
Annotate what I read in Instapaper with highlights and notes
When I'm done reading an article, export my annotations into Ulysses
Archive the article in Instapaper
Either file the Ulysses note in a searchable index of annotations, and/or publish it somewhere (like, on this site, right here)

The iOS Instapaper app is particularly good at handling steps 3-5. The missing pieces for me have tradtionally been:

I don't read my queue on a regular basis (I usually ignore the Instapaper app entirely unless I'm on a plane...)
I don't do anything with the notes I export (they accumulate in my Ulysses inbox, making it one more endless closet full of junk that's intimidating to process...)

So how can I patch these holes? When there's a thing that requires a little effort on a regular basis, the solution is generally build a habit.

A couple ways to build these habits:

Schedule a regular time, both to read Instapaper (I could do it over coffee in the morning, for example, or in late afternoon when my brain is mostly dead anyway), and to format and publish my notes²
Chain the new activity to an existing activity, see the mention of coffee above (I already tend to read email or whatever I came across on the intertron while I drink coffee in the morning), or every time I sit down on public transit I look at Instapaper instead of whatever else I do on my phone...

Having said all of this (and this post has pretty much been me thinking out loud, I hope it's useful... or even, in retrospect, coherent 😏), I have a couple actions I can take³:

Set up an email filter that shunts some of the newsletters I'm subscribed to to the Instapaper email address that exists for that purpose
Schedule a time to read Instapaper for X minutes
Create a template for posting my annotations from an Instapaper article
Schedule a time to post annotations from 1 article
Create entries in Streaks or somewhere similar to reinforce the habits above

Well, then! This all sounds good, doesn't it? Let's see if I actually do it. Watch this space. 🤔

An issue I've found when routing things to Instapaper from my Mac is the routine failure of the Javascript bookmarklet in Safari to work the way it's supposed to. I haven't figured out if this is due to a plugin conflict, or what... but it does exert some negative pressure against saving everything I want to Read Later to Instapaper. Update: Instapaper now has a Safari extension, installed via the Mac App Store, which I suspect will be more reliable than using the bookmarklet. So I'm back in business for this bit! 👍🏼 ↩
Formatting and publishing the notes would be much easier given a simple template and process for doing so. Right now they just go into Ulysses with the vague thought that "I'll do something with that, someday." ↩
Which actions should go into OmniFocus... if you think I'll actually use it! ↩

Resources for Gardening and Growing Vegetables

2020-03-03T20:17:26-08:00

I've been wanting to take up gardening for a long time—in particular, growing some of the veggies I use in my everyday cooking. This is both a health thing, a sustainability thing... and just a nerd thing. There's a lot about the idea of growing crops that appeals to me... and better done in the real world than in Stardew Valley. 😛

I'm just about a total newbie at this, but I signed up for a plot in my local community garden (as a bit of a forcing function!) so it's time I actually learned... how to garden.

I'll keep track of useful resources here as I learn pretty much from scratch.

Tools

✅ Gardening gloves

Potential Crops

Garlic
Onions
Bell peppers
Herbs
- Basil
- Mint
Spices?

Articles to Read

General Gardening

Crop Specific

Journal

Onions

Got some onion sets. Sounds like plant them 4 inches apart to get full bulbs (takes up a lot of space), or 2 inches apart to harvest greens. I might do both styles in different sections, since I have a lot of sets...

2020-04-09

Put the blueberries, onions, cilantro, and mint that I managed to get from the garden store into the plot yesterday and watered them in. Need to find out of there a hose/tap near my plot because trying to fill a can from the rainwater reservoir takes forever—and it hasn't been raining, so that supply is probably running out!
I left room for a second blueberry plant, because I hear you get better results if you plant two different varieties near each other so they can cross-pollinate. Also heard you need acidic soil for blueberries, but one thing at a time: let's see what I can grow at all, I'm not trying to optimize yet.
I'll need to look up how often everything needs watered. It's gotten warm, I don't see rain in the forecast, and if I don't make myself a watering routine, I'm gonna forget about those poor plants and they'll dry out...

2020-04-16

I've been thinking I need to water the garden a lot (like maybe every day) because it's been hot and dry for days. But reading a bit about watering (added an Old Farmer's Almanac link in the General Gardening section above), just watering all the time is probably not necessary or a good idea. Instead, I should check what the plants look like closer to dusk (instead of mid-afternoon)—they should look less wilted then. Plus, take a trowel and dig a few inches down and see if the soil is moist. Ultimately, you want water at root depth, not just on the surface, and you don't want it hanging around on the plants themselves, as that leads to disease. So dumping water over top of the plants every day is not going to be the right move.

It would be interesting to build a little irrigation system that I could top up from some kind of reservoir (since I can't have, like, my own hose hookup in a community garden)... 🤔

What We Link to When We Link to Books

2020-02-07T13:20:54-08:00

Patrick Rhone shared a link to his /reading page, where he posts short notes on all the books he reads. I saw this page, and immediately thought two things:

I love that! I should have a /reading page on my site
…It’s too bad the hyperlinks he provides to the books all go to Amazon

I admire Patrick and his work a great deal, so I hope he doesn’t mind my calling him out—but I’m grateful for the impetus to distill my process on linking to books!

The Silo

Since I saw the link to Patrick’s page on Micro.blog, and his page is on his own website at his own domain, I presume that Patrick is on board with the principles of the IndieWeb. In brief, for those who just arrived:

Putting all of our creative work in the hands of, and binding it to the terms of, monolithic corporate “silos” is a bad idea.

And Amazon is very much such a silo, for authors especially. If you want to make a living selling books, you can’t really ignore Amazon: they control the vast majority of the ebook sales market.

As an author it makes a lot of sense to have your books on Amazon. But being on only Amazon is dangerous, for the same reason that all content silos are dangerous: because now this gigantic, for-profit, publicly-traded American corporation, whose purpose here on the planet Earth is emphatically not to support your creative aspirations, makes the rules about who gets to see your book and under what circumstances.

Amazon owning book distribution is not ideal. So I will argue that authors should prefer to “go wide”, in the parlance of the indie-publishing community, and make their book available in as many different channels as possible. Including, but not limited to, Amazon.

Okay, fine. But what about those of us who merely wish to share the work of authors? What’s the best way to do that?

The problem with linking to Amazon as a “safe default”¹ is the same as the problem with just publishing your book on Amazon and calling it a day: it entrenches Amazon as The One True Place Where Books Are, and, while convenient, that’s not good. It’s not good for authors, it’s not actually very good for readers, and I’m going to go so far as to say it’s not good for society to have one big private corporation responsible for distributing such a huge proportion of the collective written work of the human race.

The Solution

If I’ve succeeded in making the argument that linking to books on Amazon is worth reconsidering, you’re wondering what to do instead! Here’s the process I’ve devised for linking to books. Like all such trade-offs, it’s less convenient (but not a lot less, especially with some tricks that I’ll describe), but better in the ways that matter.

Best: Link to the author/book’s web page

When I want to link to a book (this happens pretty often, in the show notes of the podcast that I host), I’ll first do a quick search to see if the book or its author has a dedicated website (examples: Atomic Habits, The War of Art). If so, I’ll link to that. In a moment, I’ll explain how I make the act of linking really easy with a keyboard macro, but first let’s talk alternatives if a dedicated page isn’t available.

Good: Link to the book’s Goodreads page

Now, granted: Goodreads is owned by Amazon. So it could, in the future, share the disadvantages of linking to a book on Amazon directly. But for now Goodreads seems to be a reliable place to find books, and the page for a book on Goodreads tends to include links to multiple ways of acquiring the book in addition to Amazon². It even links to WorldCat, so you can find the book at a library, which brings me to…

Better/Best for older/out-of-print/rare books: Link to WorldCat

For books that are hard to find in online stores, or perhaps for books that you took out of the library and you want to pay it forward, link to the book on WorldCat, which is, as far as I can tell, the best way to link to a book so that a reader can find it at their local library. WorldCat’s page for a book also includes links to some online stores, including Amazon (though not as many as Goodreads does), so WorldCat may be the best alternative to a book’s dedicated website.

Making It Easy

I link to books a lot, and I do most of my writing in Markdown, so I want to make two things as easy as possible:

Searching the places mentioned above for the book
Creating a Markdown link to the book to use in my notes… or in a blog post, or a Micro.blog post, or to transform into an HTML link, or whatever

Easy website searches with Alfred

I use Alfred instead of Spotlight on macOS, and one of its many useful features is the ability to create custom web searches. I’ve created these for both Goodreads and WorldCat, so that all I have to do is activate Alfred and type,

good the war of art

cat atomic habits

And hit Return, and my browser will open with the search results page for the given query on Goodreads or on WorldCat, respectively. Then you click the correct result to view the book’s page, and that’s where the next part comes in…

Easy Markdown links with Keyboard Maestro

If you use a Mac, Keyboard Maestro is an amazing tool for automating common tasks and giving them simple keyboard shortcuts³.

I have a macro in Keyboard Maestro⁴ where, when I’m viewing a web page in Safari, if I hit ^ + Shift + C, it uses AppleScript to retrieve the page’s Title and URL and glom them together into a Markdown link, and put that link on the clipboard.

So if I’m looking at the website for The War of Art, I can just hit that shortcut and, when I paste into my notes, I get: [The War of Art – Steven Pressfield](https://stevenpressfield.com/books/the-war-of-art/)

This is crazy-useful stuff!

In Conclusion

Amazon, like all the big tech companies, has brought an unprecedented level of convenience and value to our lives. But convenience can lull us into a blissful paralysis in which we never consider the trade-offs of the choices we’re making—we stop thinking of them as choices:

Of course you order things off Amazon because they’re cheaper and you get same-or-one-day free shipping to your door.

Of course you link to books (or anything) on Amazon, because you know it’ll be there and that’s where any interested party (in Canada, America, the UK, Australia, and Germany, anyway…) will be buying the thing, after all.

And then, one day, when we’re confronted with an ugly trade-off of living in Amazon’s world, it’ll just be “the way things are”.

Is that a bit high-minded, or even histrionic, when the topic at hand is just hyperlinking to a book? Well, no. There’s a reason this website exists, and why it’s at danj.ca and not medium.com/@something, and there’s a reason why Patrick and I were talking about this in the first place on micro.blog and not on twitter.com: If you believe that retaining an open, independent internet is important, that access to books—as repositories of our collective ideas and culture—should not be controlled by a single for-profit enterprise, what can you do?

It’s 2020 and you and I both have Amazon Prime subscriptions and we’re not cancelling them anytime soon. We can barely change the trajectory of the world… but we can change it. And how we link to the books we read is one small thing we can do. Small changes are what we have to give, so I hope you’ll consider taking seriously what is within your power to change.

“safe” because almost any book you could possibly recommend is available there—heck, it’s probably how you read the book yourself ↩
One thing it seems to lack is a link to the book’s ‘canonical’ website, which is unfortunate, but perhaps can be remedied by the author/publisher when they put the book on Goodreads? 🤔 ↩
There are other tools like this on the Mac, and similar tools for Windows and Linux—if you prefer the keyboard to the mouse, and prefer automation to doing repetitive tasks over and over every day, it’s worth trying one of these tools out for your chosen environment. 🤓 ↩
h/t to my boss, Sean McCabe; I’m pretty sure I got it from him… ↩

The Last Psychiatrist: Friday Diversion: Jonathan Coulton

2020-02-01T20:47:43-08:00

It's a stunning thought, to the point of vertigo, how much time and energy and sweat and blood we invest in a life we don't actually want.

[...]

It is no surprise that the people we admire took alternate paths.

Both Coulton and the sadly-defunct The Last Psychiatrist blog were essential inspirations for the extremely gradual path I've been taking from the life I somewhat-blindly entered after university to the life I actually want. I'm pinning—and sharing—this post as a reminder. ❤️

Two Quotations From Anaïs Nin, Visualized by Debbie Millman

2020-01-23T13:51:39-08:00

I love both of these, but I was particularly drawn by the one about anxiety, that being one of my things.

Anaïs Nin on Love, Hand-Lettered by Debbie Millman – Brain Pickings

"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might. When a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."

Puts in perspective a thing my ex-wife once said to me, paraphrased: "I feel like I'm married to your anxiety."

Anaïs Nin on Real Love, Illustrated by Debbie Millman – Brain Pickings

"Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws."

Puts in perspective the difference between having a crush on someone and loving someone. The latter requires you to know who they are, the former requires you not to.

(via brainpickings.org)

Doubling Down on OmniFocus

2020-01-14T20:45:53-08:00

OmniFocus is one of these accessories for my 'aspirational' life. You know, I want to be this disciplined, highly-organized and productive person, and this tool should help me do that.

But really, I've owned a license to this app on both the Mac and iOS for years, and never really succeeded in using it to run my life.

Well, one of my themes for the new year is to be more accepting of things like that, but not to give up on them. So I've been taking a course, David Sparks's OmniFocus Field Guide, and getting back into using the app. Figuring out how to replace the built-in Reminders app with it, etc. Working on building routines.

I'm steeling myself for three months from now when I realize I've abandoned it again, but my provisional plan for dealing with that is just... to start again.

Lot of things this year gonna be like that, probably. And, I hope.

More notes on OmniFocus as I get into the groove.

How to Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You

2019-12-30T20:43:18-08:00

I have really mixed feelings about this massive article, which I'm bookmarking because I'm only part way through it.

The good: it's full of extremely tactical actions you can take right now, while you're reading it.

The bad: it's on Medium 😛; the writer is, um, rather pretentious and self-satisfied; the constant appeals to personal longevity are, I think, off the mark. If you're going to change a bunch of settings to reclaim your time and attention, a la Digital Minimalism, do it because it improves the quality of your life and your interactions with others and the world around you. The idea that you should set your wallpaper to a picture of your pet because there's some statistical correlation between looking at a dog and having 10% less chance to die of a heart attack (paraphrasing :P) is so... I don't know, it's kind of everything that makes me roll my eyes about the tech-yuppie-utopian-immortality set. Like, sure, do whatever you can to preserve your physical health, but maybe that could be lower on your list of priorities (i.e. choose quality over quantity).

Still. An article I want to refer back to. Probably.

Simple Opt Out

2019-12-29T21:03:23-08:00

It's obnoxious that this is even required—and who knows how effective it is to opt out of any of these companies. Are they trustworthy?—But it's worth taking a look, for the sake of your online hygiene.

Curtis McHale on Opening His Workflows

2019-12-28T20:54:31-08:00

I like Curtis's post about finding open alternatives to even excellent apps like Ulysses: in the longish run, I'd like to do the same. Bookmarking this for reference (and props).

Self-hosting Email: Good Idea or Terrible? 🤔

2019-12-28T20:46:30-08:00

I've had a tab for this 2014 Ars Technica article open for ages, let me collect the series here:

I don't know if (a) these recommendations are all still good, 5+ years on, or, more importantly, if (b) self-hosting email is even remotely worth it. But, as someone who semi-regularly gets bitten by the "host all the things" bug, I figured it's worth starting a collection on the topic.

How to Re-fold an IKEA Bag

2019-12-27T18:49:58-08:00

This is one of those things I find myself needing to do to keep my place tidy, and it's easy to let it slide if you don't know the process, and then the next thing you know you've had this stupid blue plastic bag lying in the corner of your entryway for months, and you don't realize it but it's slowly driving you mad.

So, better to just fold 'em up, put an elastic band around them, and put them in the closet:

Push the bottom in, like an "inverted taco"
Flatten the sides outward, so the bag, lying flat on its side, has a sort of "boat" shape
Fold the handles down onto the bag
Fold the sides of the bag over top of the handles, so the outline is now a rectangle
Fold one side over top the other, basically folding the rectangle in half
Now fold the handles at the top downwards, and then fold again, so you've folded it vertically in thirds
Now you've got the bag into a small rectangular shape; Put an elastic band around to keep it like that

(via youtube search)

Tim Ferriss Podcast: Tristan Harris — Fighting Skynet and Firewalling Attention

2019-12-25T18:18:16-08:00

This is an excellent episode. Tristan is eloquent about where the attention economy came from, and what we would need to do to counter its massive negative effects.

A Week-by-Week Guide to Becoming a Runner (Later in Life and/or Safely)

2019-12-24T20:14:11-08:00

I got back into running recently, and am following this training guide, which basically starts you out mixing a little jogging with your walking, but steadily works its way up to running for one hour non-stop (after 13 weeks).

Slow and steady avoids injury, and all that. I need to combine it with plenty of stretching, though...

Also, in a depressing example of how fragile the web is, the link in that article to running form guidelines goes to a domain that no longer exists. 😒

Here's the Wayback Machine link: Benson's EPS - Basic Movements in Running

Crock Pot Picadillo

2019-12-24T20:05:45-08:00

I've been making this dish on the regular. It's a little different from my usual slow-cooker chilli, and is great on rice, on a tortilla, or with tortilla chips.

Ingredients

2.5 lbs extra lean ground beef
1 cup minced onion¹
1 cup diced red bell peppers
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup minced cilantro
1 small tomato, diced
8 oz. can tomato sauce
1/4 cup alcaparrado, manzanilla olives, pimientos, capers, or green olives (I've been using castelvetrano—I love the colour, and they have a mild taste)
1.5 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp garlic powder
2 bay leaves
salt and pep to taste, just like every other recipe in the universe

Instructions (this is how I do it: for the instructions as given, check the link)

Brown the meat in dutch oven over medium-high heat
Drain the meat (or not?), add onions, garlic, and bell peppers and cook another 3-4 minutes
Add tomato, cilantro, tomato sauce, 1.25 cups water, olives (plus some brine from the jar), then the spices
Put dutch oven in 350°F oven for 1-1.5 hours (I usually take out and stir after an hour, then give it another half hour or so)
Once it's ready, taste and add salt/pep/more spices as desired
Discard bay leaves and serve
Makes about 5-6 250g servings

Let's be honest: I don't measure out a cup; I just chop up one onion and one bell pepper and put them all in. ↩

Roll Your Own Drag-and-Drop File Sharing Service

2019-12-21T21:57:56-08:00

I use, but don't really like, CloudApp to share files (mostly images). The desired solution is:

Drag a file to an icon or something
The file is uploaded somewhere that it can be linked to via URL (ideally at a domain I control)
The URL goes on my clipboard and I can easily share it

If you pay for CloudApp, it does work with your own domain... but I kind of dislike having a third-party service for this at all.

The link above is to an old article from 2012, so there are almost certainly better solutions for self-hosting a file-linking thingamabob, but I'm bookmarking this as a start.

Micropub to Jekyll via GitHub

2019-12-17T17:18:01-08:00

Example that may be relevant to building my own static CMS (if you have a static site generator, you need some trigger to regenerate the site in response to a Micropub call, if you want to be able to update the site from a Micropub client).

(via Indieweb wiki on Micropub)

Reddit Threads on Programmatically Controlling ErgoDox LEDs

2019-12-17T17:07:53-08:00

This thread links to a bunch of people's work on communicating with the ErgoDox (or, more generally, QMK) from code. ErgoDox tweeted this in response to me asking if there was some way to integrate the keyboard's LEDs with e.g. HomeKit... ultimately, I want to control the keyboard lighting the same way I control the Philips Hue lamp on my desk.

Something to hack on someday.

(via @ErgoDoxEZ on twitter)

Easy 10-Min Healthy Pumpkin Waffles Recipe

2019-12-15T20:01:32-08:00

These look delicious. Time to buy a waffle iron!

Ingredients for 8 waffles

1 cup raw oats, blended into flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup 2% cottage cheese
3 eggs + 2 egg whites, lightly beaten
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 can (15oz) pumpkin purée (or baked sweet potato)
2 teaspoons cinnamon (optional, but recommended)
Spray olive oil

Steps

Fire up the waffle iron.
In a high powered blender or food processor, oats and blend until you create flour. Set in a bowl and mix with baking powder.
Add cottage cheese to the blender and blend until it becomes soft, creamy and smooth with little to no curds. Add it to the bowl with the flour along with the eggs. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix together until the batter is thick, yet still runny. Note: if you’d like to make pancakes instead, simply add in another egg white and/or add tablespoons of almond milk until the batter is slightly more runny.
Add the batter to the waffle iron and cook until your desired readiness, about 3 to 6 minutes. If you’re making these for weekly meal prep, allow the waffles to completely cool before wrapping them in plastic wrap and placing them in the freezer.
Enjoy with fresh berries and your choice of syrup or agave.

(via Fit Men Cook)

“You Don’t “Succeed” Because You Have No Weaknesses...”

2019-12-15T19:43:05-08:00

You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.

-- Tim Ferriss, Tribe of Mentors

alt.interoperability.adversarial

2019-12-15T17:45:15-08:00

Important article by Cory Doctorow about "adversarial interoperability" - the concept of building a system that interoperates with an existing system for the purposes of competing with it—what it is, why it matters, and what's happened to it.

In short: alt. took over from Usenet in a way that federated social networks are struggling to take over from facebook and twitter.

(via... I can't remember; EFF's newsletter, probably)

Creative Spark: Dustin Lance Black

2019-12-09T17:26:56-08:00

Short video about Dustin's writing process: he does a shit-ton of outlining on cards ahead of time, which I think is what Joe wanted me to see an example of.

(via Joe Nassise)

D.J. Jamison - Advice for Aspiring Writers

2019-12-09T16:19:26-08:00

"What’s your advice for aspiring writers?"

Keep writing, and don't walk away when you're discouraged. Finish your projects.

I still feel like an aspiring writer. I'm self-published. No one shook my hand and told me I'd make a most excellent author, and that's a scary thing. I took a leap.

I spent years toying around with unfinished manuscripts. You know what got me out of that rut? I decided enough was enough, and I committed to a publish date. Even now that I've published my writing, I still use pre-orders not just as a marketing tool, but to force myself to finish my projects. Maybe it's the former journalist in me, but I need deadlines.

So, try giving yourself a deadline. But don't make it a soft deadline in your head. Commit to sending your work somewhere: to a beta reader, a friend, a book agent or online to Smashwords or Amazon Direct Publishing.

Try writing novellas instead of the great American novel to start out. Finish a shorter piece, and you'll figure out some of the formula for finishing a longer one. You'll also prove to yourself that you can finish it.

Then comes the hardest part. You have to set it free.

Good luck!

I came across this person when searching for my own author name. At least in terms of pronunciation, they're awfully similar. 😂 Anyway, I really like her advice, quoted above.

Resources for Building My Own Site Generator

2019-12-09T16:15:13-08:00

There's no good reason I should build my own site generator, instead of just using Jekyll (as I am at the time of writing this post.)

No good reason, other than I want to, other than I miss software development and, more specifically, have never really done a big software development project for my own sake, as opposed to for school or a boss.

And I don't know that I'll break ground on it anytime soon, but meanwhile let me keep a list of resources I will probably use:

Development

Planning on using F#, because I'm a .NET developer and it's always appealed to me. Capturing a few links for getting an F# dev environment up and running on my Mac using Visual Studio Code:

Get Started with F# in Visual Studio Code - Microsoft Docs - This is from 2018 and is probably a little out of date, but it's a starting point
How to set up F# development in visual studio code - General - F# Software Foundation Community Forums - This looks a little more up-to-date, and links to some other resources that could be useful.

Admittedly, having never written an entire application in F#, one thing I've been wondering is how you effectively structure a complex F# program with multiple modules. Some things to read:

Organizing modules in a project - F# for fun and profit - This website (and the ebook created from it) is my main resource for learning F# in the first place, so this is an obvious place to start.
f# - How do you design a functional program? - Stack Overflow - This StackOverflow thread looks like it contains some useful ideas (or links to same).
Building Real-World Applications in F# - Real World F# - Medium This is on Medium, alas, but ought to be useful (and the name of the blog suggests it will have further useful articles, too).

Templating

{{ mustache }} - logicless templates. Having looked at mostly this and Liquid, I think I prefer the 'stache
GitHub - StubbleOrg/Stubble: Trimmed down {{mustache}} templates in .NET - A .NET library for parsing the above. I might use this as a basis for writing my own parser, if I feel sufficiently crazy.

Metadata

YAML Ain’t Markup Language (YAML™) Version 1.2 - This is the metadata format that Jekyll and apparently several other state-site generators use as the front matter for their posts. I'm a fan of it because
- It's plain text, so hypothetically easy to parse in future
- It's designed to be human-readable, like Markdown, so you can have text files that both make sense if you just look at them, but can be reliably and processed into something else via software
- It's a superset of JSON, the other simple and ubiquitious textual metadata format, which could come in handy
  So I plan to use YAML as the frontmatter for my generator (this also lets me easily-if-not-trivially migrate my existing content from Jekyll when the time comes).
GitHub - aaubry/YamlDotNet: YamlDotNet is a .NET library for YAML - I'll need some way to parse YAML, so I'm going to... write my own parser. That's the plan, anyway. Like this entire project, there's no good reason to write your own parser when solid ones already exist, except as an exercise in learning how to write a parser. So that's exactly what I'm doing. I intend to write it in F#, building on Understanding parser combinators - F# for fun and profit. I'm linking to this existing .NET YAML parser, because I'll probably want to use its code as a reference.

Scott Hanselman: URLs are UI

2019-12-09T16:12:31-08:00

A favourite post from one of my favourite tech bloggers, Scott Hanselman. I keep this in mind when trying to decide how the URLs on this IndieWeb site should work.

PrivacyTools

2019-12-09T16:03:50-08:00

Critical hub for learning about tools and services that respect / protect your online privacy.

Sovereign Bodies Institute

2019-12-09T15:52:27-08:00

SBI is a home for generating new knowledge and understandings of how Indigenous nations and communities are impacted by gender and sexual violence, and how they may continue to work towards healing and freedom from such violence.

I saw this site linked to somewhere, and wanted to bookmark it for future investigation. I feel woefully ignorant of indigenous issues (and intimidated by the thought of countenancing them, let's be honest). At least let me not ignore resources when they're dropped in my lap.

Antony Johnston - The Organized Writer

2019-12-07T20:21:58-08:00

My man Antony Johnston's take on organizational techniques that work for him. I want to get more organized, seems a good time to read this old article again.

Antony Johnston - Just Write

2019-12-07T20:20:53-08:00

Perennial favourite from one of my heroes, Antony Johnston. One of many exhortations to "write more, more often" that I am trying to actually live.

F# for Fun and Profit

2019-12-05T22:49:26-08:00

This is basically my go-to site for learning F#. Full of good explanations of concepts, and worked examples.

Aaron Parecki's Home Automation Masterpost

2019-12-04T21:32:09-08:00

IndieWeb supernerd Aaron shared this post on Micro.blog the other day, and, having just bought Hue bulbs, I definitely want to dig into this. He has a focus on doing home automation while staying off "the cloud", which is totally my jam.

(via @aaronpk on Micro.blog)

(...interesting how he does permalinks to status posts like that! 🤔)

What can we do with the Librem 13 v2's USB-C port?

2019-11-25T18:11:29-08:00

I asked this question a while back—if I ever get back to playing with my Librem laptop, it's worth keeping an eye on this.

Matthew Walker's “Why We Sleep” Is Apparently Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors

2019-11-25T17:46:43-08:00

Dang, I was quite compelled by Walker's various podcast appearances. You just can't trust anyone these days. 😏

Well. The fact is, science is hard, uncertainty is the only thing that's certain... and you have to be willing to stay sceptical without checking out entirely.

Honestly, that last might be the hardest thing of all.

All it really means to me is, best to keep experimenting to figure out what sort of sleep schedule suits me.

(via Mark Manson's newsletter)

Memory Matters

2019-11-22T10:48:43-08:00

Memory matters.

We need to know what we were, where we came from, to know who we are, where we're going.

This is true of the individual as well as the society, the species.

It's a powerful thing to crack open your journal from five years ago and be reminded of what you were doing, where you lived, what you read, who you dated, where you went, what you saw, and how you thought and felt about those things.

Now imagine that being taken away from you.

That's not some kind of scare tactic—actually, I guess it is. When we put things on the internet, they go into our shared memory. When they disappear from the internet—because a site goes down, or because the platform where they were posted changes its terms of service or goes out of business or gets strip-mined for its resources by choose your favourite of the five biggest companies in the world—we lose part of our shared memory. Our shared experience. The thing that binds us together, that makes us human... or at least adds us to the ranks of social animals.

Does that sound too lofty a sentiment to apply to some dumb post you made on Tumblr ten years ago, or your shitty drawing on DeviantArt?

Fine. But why differentiate? The forces that will destroy your creation aren't going to.

And regardless... the thing you made is YOURS. You MADE it, for fucksake. That's the greatest power a human being has: to create, whether it's actual progeny or just a bad poem. You made it, it's yours. Why should someone else—who doesn't give a shit, who doesn't even know you exist—decide to take it away?

They shouldn't be able to. And as long as we've gone to the trouble as a human race to build a worldwide, persistent network of information on which anyone can share anything with anyone else... if you think what I just described is a common good, I have some tough news for you: it needs maintenance, protection, and active, ongoing defence.

Because it is constantly rusting, withering, and being subverted for miserly, avaricious purposes.

I suppose this is a call to donate to the Internet Archive, but, more broadly, to support the people fighting to keep the web open.

Fighting sounds ridiculous right? Like, are they wearing body armor and carrying assault rifles? Well, no, fortunately we haven't been put in a position like that... most of us.

But there are plenty of interests with more money and power than you have, and they run counter to your own. Unless you think that's just fine, do something about it. The principles of the Indieweb are the best thing I can think of, that don't require a lot of money or political power, that are available to everyone in return for some time and some creative effort.

If you don't think the work of your hands and heart are worth that, well... I'm happy to be the one to tell you you're wrong.

Medium Is Bad for the Web

2019-11-22T09:49:44-08:00

Medium is bad for the web. It’s just one more silo that people pour their creative work into, because it promises convenience and reach. And then it looks like your work is on the internet, but it isn’t, really.

And Medium is arguably more sinister than e.g. Facebook in this regard, because it looks and has been advertised as a place that’s all about content creators.

Well, it is all about content creators, the same way every other silo is all about their users, which is—to make a tired but utterly appropriate callback to 1999—the way the AI in The Matrix was all about human beings. 🤖

Proposed Indieweb slogan: Don’t Be a Battery

But a better one is probably just: Own Your Platform

(This outburst motivated by Instapaper’s inability to render a Medium article.)

Follow-up thoughts to Medium is Bad for the Web¹:

The article I was attempting to save for later was How to Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You
it looks like an incredibly-valuable article. So it's too bad Medium controls who can see it, and under what circumstances
I should have added, when saying Medium is more sinister than Facebook: We all get that Facebook is a walled garden (it might be, at least for my generation, the prototypical example of such); most of what you put on Facebook cannot be seen by anyone who isn't logged in to Facebook, which is a feature in many ways: privacy (nevermind that Facebook can see it). But Medium posts have URLs, which makes it look like they're part of the web. But—and newspaper paywalls have this same problem—it's when you try to share those URLs and are met with a doorslam, or try to save them to an API endpoint and it fails, that the facade shatters. Actually, Medium will decide whether you get to read the article or not
A lot of writers may argue that they make money from posting on Medium, and that requires some level of control, because restricting access is what makes Medium content valuable. Which is just a return to the world of publishers / gatekeepers that the internet has let us escape. The reason Indieweb is crucial is because when a technological sea change levels the playing field between the powerful and the rest of us, it is inevitable that the powerful (and those who leverage the change to become powerful) will find ways to un-level the playing field again. If we don't fight back, writers in 2025 end up just like writers in 1985: beholden to huge corporate interests that decide how and when and to whom our work will be presented... and whether we can feed our families with it.²

Ooh, see that? a URL at my own domain. That's how it's done. ↩
...If I'd known this was going to get so long, I'd have posted it to my non-Micro site (especially so I could edit it!) 😅 Maybe I'll do that anyway... ↩

Unicode Lookup: Convert Special Characters

2019-11-20T14:07:21-08:00

Awesome tool for finding special characters (and their related encodings/code points/etc.) or even taking an unfamiliar character and finding out what the heck it is.

A Matter of Degrees

2019-11-20T13:56:00-08:00

It's possible I'll regret using this title to make a pun about the degree symbol (°), instead of saving it for a pun about the weather, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I noticed, when copying a bunch of temperatures from a website into a CSV file into a Markdown table, that all but one of the degree symbols came out like º instead of like °. Now, depending what application is rendering those symbols, they might look the same. But, in Visual Studio Code, using the Fira Code font, the former has a little line underneath the circle.

I wondered what the difference was, and what was going on. According to the Wikipedia article on the degree symbol, it's rendered without an underline. But the most-common lookalike symbol is (emphasis mine):

U+00BA º MASCULINE ORDINAL INDICATOR (HTML º · º) (superscript letter o used in abbreviating words; varies with the font and sometimes underlined)

A-ha. Whatever that symbol is for¹, it doesn't mean "degrees". So, even though I could just leave those symbols in the table, because who gives a damn... I'm a nerd, and I did all of this research instead, before replacing the ordinal indicators with proper degree symbols. Like a gentleman. You're welcome. 🤓

Update, 2020-03-15: My boss sent me a document which mistakenly contained the ordinal indicator, and I sent him this article because I knew he'd appreciate the explanation². He mentioned that he'd written the document on his iPad using an external keyboard, and he'd typed ⌥ + 0 to produce the symbol, assuming that did the same thing as long-pressing the 0 on the iPad's on-screen keyboard and selecting the degree symbol that appears.

Alas, no. It's a matter of history: ⌥ + 0 on the Mac produces the ordinal indicator, and evidently the iPad external keyboard matches the Mac's keyboard shortcuts, not the shortcuts that are available by long-pressing keys on the iOS on-screen keyboard! The keyboard shortcut for typing a degree symbol is ⌥ + Shift + 8. So there, iOS users: forewarned is forearmed.

oh, it's for declaring a numeral as ordinal rather than cardinal in certain languages; the way "1^st" means "first" and not "one" in English, 1º means "first" in Italian... ↩
Or I did it because I knew it would annoy him, you decide. 😏 ↩

Markdown Tables Generator

2019-11-20T13:50:10-08:00

Sweet (though non-SSL 😜) utility for easily creating tables in a variety of formats (Markdown being the one I'm interested in).

I used it to create the table in this post, by copying the table off of the website, pasting it into a Numbers document, exporting that to CSV, and loading the CSV into this tool. Worked pretty well.

Markdown Guide: Extended Syntax Reference

2019-11-20T13:46:45-08:00

I can't remember if I'd come across the Markdown Guide before—useful reference for the less-common bits of Markdown, like tables.

In fact, I found the site when searching for evidence that Jekyll supports Markdown tables (it does). The list of tools and what features they support is handy. 👍🏼

Cooking Oils and Smoke Points

2019-11-20T13:38:30-08:00

I'd been looking for a quick reference for the smoke points of various cooking oils. I tend to use EVOO for everything, or Avocado Oil for higher-temp frying, or as an alternative to Coconut Oil (which is high in saturated fat).

In fact, in addition to containing the useful table below, this article points out that, as a rule of thumb, oils which are solid at room temperature (coconut oil, and, oh, I don't know, butter) tend to be higher in sat fat, and should therefore be used sparingly.

I mean, butter also has a super-low smoke point, but it's pretty much irreplaceable in the dishes that call for it (most baking, for example). At least in this amateur cook's opinion.

Oil	Smoke Point °F	Smoke Point °C
Refined Avocado Oil	520°F	270°C
Safflower Oil	510°F	265°C
Rice Bran Oil	490°F	254°C
Refined or Light Olive Oil	465°F	240°C
Soybean Oil	450°F	232°C
Peanut Oil	450°F	232°C
Ghee or Clarified Butter	450°F	232°C
Corn Oil	450°F	232°C
Refined Coconut Oil	450°F	232°C
Safflower Oil	440°F	227°C
Refined Sesame Oil	410°F	210°C
Vegetable Oil	400-450°F	204-232°C
Beef Tallow	400°F	204°C
Canola Oil	400°F	204°C
Grapeseed Oil	390°F	199°C
Unrefined or Virgin Avocado Oil	375°F	190°C
Pork Fat or Lard	370°F	188°C
Chicken Fat or Schmaltz	375°F	190°C
Duck Fat	375°F	190°C
Vegetable Shortening	360°F	182°C
Unrefined Sesame Oil	350°F	177°C
Extra Virgin or Unrefined Coconut Oil	350°F	177°C
Extra Virgin Olive Oil	325-375°F	163-190°C
Butter	302°F	150°C

Align SVG Icons to Text and Say Goodbye to Font Icons

2019-11-16T21:05:11-08:00

I used this article to properly position the little Micro.blog logo next to the Status Feed link in this site's navigation bar. Useful!

Libby, by OverDrive - an App for Library Ebooks and Audiobooks

2019-11-16T21:01:19-08:00

Looks like a big leap over the old OverDrive app I used years ago. Gotta check this out—it would be nice to patronize my local library with the same convenience that currently drains my bank account to fill up my Kindle. 😅

2019-11-16-20-55-28-1906991710

2019-11-16T20:55:28-08:00

This is what a "status"-style post, the kind you'd see on my status feed would look like here on this site. I'm not sure it makes sense here, but this is an experiment.

Video: My Philosophy for a Happy Life | Sam Berns | TEDxMidAtlantic

2019-11-16T11:25:48-08:00

I'm glad I took the 12 minutes. Don't cheat yourself out of watching the video, but I'm collecting these bullets to remind myself:

Be okay with what you ultimately can't do... because there's so much you CAN do
Surround yourself with people you want to be around
Keep moving forward
Never miss a party if you can help it

Truer words, and all that. 😄

(via Tim Ferriss's "5-Bullet Friday")

xkcd: Map Age Guide

2019-11-15T18:18:58-08:00

This flowchart for determining the age of a map is half ridiculous and half enlightening.

(via Tumblr)

Useful Terminal Trick - Putting a Bunch of Files in Eponymous Folders

2019-11-12T15:40:16-08:00

I just downloaded the caption files to a bunch of video clips, and wanted each one to go in a folder with its same name (minus the file extension), cos that’s where the work on each clip is going to happen. I found a script to do that all at once from the Terminal. From here:

> for file in *.srt; do
>   dir=${file%%.*}
>   mkdir -p -- "$dir"
>   mv "$file" "$dir" 
> done

Note the semicolon that appears after the file extension, but before the do¹. It’s nice to be able to do this at the command line, without having to write a script, as a one-off thing.

I put the semicolon after do at first, and had to figure out why the following command was invalid... 😜 ↩

Just Getting Started

2019-11-12T11:54:12-08:00

One of my IndieWeb idols, Brent Simmons, writes about his blog turning 20.

I've said it before, but I always look at blogs like that and think, "Why don't I have one of those?" Congrats to Brent, and thanks to him and every other consistent blogger for helping me keep the fire burning to write things and post them on the internet.

Old proverb: “The best time to start a blog is 20 years ago. The second-best time is today.” :)

Brent also writes:

For the entire 20 years of inessential.com, I’ve been in the same house, at the same desk, with even the same keyboard.

I can't imagine that degree of stability. I moved out of my parents' house in 2005, and I've moved, on average, every eighteen months since.

When you put it like that, it sounds crazy.

Well, I can aspire to a blog with five thousand posts on it, and I can aspire to a life that eventually keeps a little more steady for a little longer interval.

One Page Dungeon by watabou

2019-11-04T14:06:45-08:00

I have a powerful need. 🤤

via kottke.org

Vegan Black Bean Chocolate Fudge Brownies

2019-11-04T14:03:01-08:00

VEGAN BLACK BEAN CHOC FUDGE BROWNIES

1 1/2 cups black beans (1 15-oz can, drained and rinsed very well) (250g after draining)
2 tbsp cocoa powder (10g)
1/2 cup quick oats (40g)
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup pure maple syrup or date syrup (75g)
1/4 cup coconut oil (40g) (Dan: I've been using avocado oil)
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup to 2/3 cup chocolate chips OR ~~raisins~~ (optional)

Blend ingredients 1. to 8. in a food processor. Then mix in 9. and pour in to a greased/oiled pan so about 1 inch thick. Place into a preheated oven (350ºF) for approx 10-15 mins. Leave 10 mins to cool then cut.

Whole recipe without choc chip OR raisins gives...

1370 Calories
30g Protein
47g Fat
216g Carbs

I usully split into 4 brownies. (Dan: I usually split into 6) And also I sometimes add a scoop or 2 of my raw cacao flavour vegan protein powder to boost the P count. Add a splash of almond milk (Dan: I usually put some milk in there. Real milk.) if mix becomes to dry!

Via the Bony to Beastly Forum (login required)

Brent Simmons: You Choose

2019-10-29T16:15:39-07:00

Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire (which I'm quite happily using—can't wait for the iOS version!) on the whole reason I've wanted to have this site:

You choose the web you want. But you have to do the work.

A lot of people are doing the work. You could keep telling them, discouragingly, that what they’re doing is dead. Or you could join in the fun.

I'm in. How about you?

(via @manton and Brent's blog itself)

Just what do I think I'm doing here?

2019-10-27T21:25:00-07:00

Every few years, I start a blog. When I don’t have a blog I think about starting one, but I dawdle and dawdle. When I see blogs I admire, I look at the list of hundreds of posts covering maybe a decade or more and think… what a missed opprotunity—why don’t I have that? I’ve wanted to write for years, but I’ve rarely written.

You can’t change the past, but you can choose your future. So, here’s me trying to write more.

So that’s one reason for this site’s existence.

Another is… I’ve always been fascinated with technology. And technology, in the course of my lifetime, has totally changed the way we live our lives. When I was a kid, I called my friends on a rotary-dial telephone, and I had to memorize their phone numbers—or keep them written down on paper until I did. I had to knock on my neighbours’ door and ask their son to come out and play.

And I won’t give further examples because this isn’t one of those “back in my day” posts, the point is… everything is at least somewhat different now, because computers and the internet aren’t just this thing on my parents’ desk in the office that they yelled at me to not use so much, especially during summer break when I could have been playing outdoors (I seem to recall still spending plenty of time outdoors). Now it’s in our pockets, now it’s everywhere, now we’re constantly carrying on a dialogue with the whole world.

At least, hypothetically.

Another thing about my youth before I move on: When I was, I don’t know I want to say 10, or 12, my parents signed me up for a “mini-university” summer camp program at one of the local universities, my eventual alma-mater. Because I’ve always been a nerd, I did the engineering-and-science-focused version of this instead of the sports version, and I got to play with computers and build gunpowder rockets and stuff—it was awesome.

But I want to share this very distinct memory of being in a classroom with the dozen or two other kids, and we had computers in front of us. We were going to be using one program in particular, I don’t remember what it was, maybe it was a drawing program. But the teacher was lecturing/warning/scolding/you know how adults are/🙄 us to, well, sit and shut up until he told us what to do, instead of just playing around with the computer like we wanted to.

Nevermind my thoughts on the free-form exploration of technology that children do naturally, and how much better suited it is to how we live our lives than doing what we’re told. The teacher had a peculiar choice of words, he said: “Don’t get hypnotized by the computer.”

And, years later, I can see how he both had a good point, and was wrong-a-long-a-ding-dong, but either way… he was already too late.

I’ve always been fascinated with technology and computers, and I’ve never wanted to stop playing with them. It was my full-time job for a decade or so, and now it’s not quite my job anymore, and I find myself jonesing to do stuff with software again, and one of the things I want to do is build a publishing platform…

Here’s why:

I love technology, but as it’s consumed the world, it’s started to feel less like a cool escape for nerds and more like a yoke around all of our necks. You know what I mean: the biggest, most powerful corporations in the world are all technology companies, and they’re all competing with each other to lock us in their digital cage instead of the other guy’s, and I don’t want to complain too hard when in general our lives are so uplifted by these marverlous toys, but… no: The fact is the modern world of technology is both amazing AND it sucks.

I think it’s important to find ways to use technologies to enable yourself, and not to enslave yourself.

Publishing your work in a place you control, where you can share it, and some multi-billion-dollar publicly-traded conglomerate can’t snap their fingers and make you disappear, the way Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter and etc. can and will and have done… that’s empowering.

Consuming an endless stream of low-value “content” specifically chosen to maximize the likelihood that you won’t ever, ever stop looking at it, or, if you do, it’s only to throw your own contribution in, to give your creative energies away to the machine that will repurpose them to keep all your friends just as hypnotized as you are… that’s being a slave.

And modern tech makes it so, so easy to be a slave.

All this leads me to wanting to own my work, fiercely own it: keep it in a format that isn’t beholden to any given piece of software, keep it on the free, open, public internet… to the extent and for as long as such a thing even still exists.

I don’t know if I’ll ever create anything “meaningful” in my life. I’m not entirely sure what that even means. But what I can do, what gives me a sense of freedom, more than anything else, is building a little thing of my own and saying, “Here it is.”

So: here it is.

Buyers Remorse

2013-12-01T21:25:00-07:00

My first job, developing a retail POS system, there was a database table that only had about eight records in it. It was called something like ReturnReason, and was a static lookup table containing, as it said on the tin, reasons why a customer was returning an item. The POS system’s users would be prompted to ask. From our perspective as customers, being asked to justify why we’re returning something feels somewhat invasive or accusatory, but it’s useful information for a retailer to have—perhaps a particular item is frequently returned because it’s found to be defective, for example.

One of the values in that lookup table always stuck out to me, as I’d never seen the phrase before: Buyers Remorse.

When you think about how ordinary a rectangle of metal and plastic is, it’s interesting to note how our feelings swing wildly around it. Before I bought an iPad, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’d go to the Apple Store on my lunch break and play with them incessantly, longing for the day I could bring one home. When we went on a trip to Europe, I convinced my wife it would be better to lug an iPad around than a laptop, and she could process all the pictures she’d take on there. She was sold. I’d already been sold, for months.

It didn’t help that we were already spending so much to take this trip: within forty eight hours of buying the iPad, I was suggesting we give it back. Couldn’t those hundreds of dollars, I reasoned, be better spent elsewhere?

We didn’t give it back, at least partly because my wife is slightly less prone to wild mood swings about personal electronics, but in this same scenario many retailers would find themselves processing a return.

And the value they’d pick in the drop down for return reason: buyers remorse.

It’s worth asking why that value in the lookup table is needed. It’s worth asking because, as with so many other aspects of our lives, nothing changed in the world before and after the purchase—of the iPad, the evening gown, the iguana, whatever—except for us.

The iPad, while delightful, is still pretty mundane compared to falling in love with the local barista or being hit by a car. Why do we obsess about the things we buy, build them up until the reality can only possibly let us down?

Maybe what we’re really building in the months before we buy the new iPad, plasma TV, or Prius is not an objectively imagined model of tablet/TV/car ownership, but a fantasy about how our lives could be different and better. A fantasy in which our current discontent doesn’t exist, swept away somehow by the nebulous qualities we’re imposing on our soon-to-be-grasped new shiny thing.

As rational beings (we believe), we rationalize: we tell ourselves once we have a faster laptop we can finally really dig into developing that iPhone app on the side. The one we just know will be a hit and let us finally quit the damned day job—we never meant to stay there more than a couple years anyway, it’s funny how time gets away from you. But now! Now we’ll have the carefree life of the indie app developer, spending sunny summer days working in the coffee shop around the corner—the one where the barista of our dreams works—or maybe we’ll ride our bike all over town seeking shady spots to sit and work peacefully for an hour, and in doing so finally get in shape after all those years of shuffling into the office every day, exerting ourselves no harder than required to catch the bus.

We’ll be free, in the ways we’ve always dreamed of being free.

And then, a week after the MacBook Air arrives, sure it’s an elegant computer that’s fast and delightful to use, but… well, we’re still the same person, living the same life.

But we can hardly articulate to ourselves the real reason for our remorse. Surely, as rational beings, we never truly dedicated a little hopeful part of ourselves to that fanciful idea; that somehow buying a new widget would make everything different, solve all our problems, make us happy? That’s ridiculous, of course.

And yet.

Ben Thompson of Stratechery made this astute observation in The Google We Always Wanted:

“The tragedy of wishes is that, when you finally get what you want, you realize that you actually didn’t want that at all.”

That’s a good coda or what I’m talking about here: you actually wanted happiness. Or security. Freedom. Or change. But all you got was an ordinary rectangle.

Thirty

2012-10-01T08:00:00-07:00

I’ve learned maybe one thing every ten years.

When I was ten I was… let’s see, in the fifth grade. And what I wanted out of life was… probably whatever was next. When you’re a kid, what you know is progression. When you’re in grade 5, all you care about is how great everything will be when you’re in grade 6, when you’re ten you just can’t wait to be eleven, then twelve, then sixteen, then a grown-up.

When I was twenty I couldn’t wait to acquire whatever it was that was supposed to fulfill me. I got out of university the year I turned twenty-three, and that same year I got a job and an apartment and a girlfriend, and the next year I got a car, and now, now it was all coming together, right?

The most vivid memory I have of my twenties is being alone in my apartment—the next apartment, after I’d broken up with the girlfriend and still had the job and car—in this run-down apartment by the highway where I was lonely all the time, talking on the phone with my mom. And I was lamenting the ennui of some menial task, like how, no matter how many times you wash your dishes or do the laundry or make yourself some food, you’ll just have to do that all over again soon. It just never stops being a struggle. And she said something like, “Well, yeah. That’s life.” And I was baffled by how profound that was. Or, if not profound, revelatory. Relevatory in the non-hyperbolic sense; she was stating an obvious truth but one I’d accepted, not really.

I suddenly saw where so much of my angst came from: the gap between my expectations and reality. At twenty-five, I should be “an adult”, or, more to the point, a “grown-up”, someone standing tall and strong at the helm of their life, chin held high while sails snapped in a sure wind.

But I was still a mess. Maybe a little less emotionally unstable than I’d been as a teenager, but really just beginning, maybe with that first revelation, to grasp the truth: that the utopian vision of adulthood I was somehow clinging to against all evidence to the contrary was fake, that you never actually reach a point where the choices you’ve made accumulate and you breeze through the rest of your life, happy and content.

I hadn’t learned that lesson at twenty-five. I’d have to do a lot of things and be disappointed by them, first. And meet my brilliant wife, and learn about the world by seeing it through her eyes.

I’ve always been heavily into the idea of the individual. I’ve always wanted to go my own way. And, whether makes me strong willed or just stubborn, I’ve thrashed in the yoke of any system placed around me, that told me how to be.

And, indeed, in my twenties I was very alone, in my head. The act of growing up means differentiating yourself, breaking away from the default set of values presented by your family. And, past that, when you’re on your own, you have a certain sort of freedom to continue believing whatever suits you best. But the problem with being just an individual is we’re trapped in our narrow perception of the universe. Since whatever upholstery has developed in our heads is what we’ve always been familiar with, we maybe don’t question what flows out of that perspective.

Say what you will about choosing to bind your life to that of another person, but it does provide an opportunity, rare for otherwise selfish creatures, to step outside your head and view yourself sideways.

I already knew I get really angry pretty often. What seeing myself from my wife’s perspective did, though, was prove that I was usually angry for no reason, or that the magnitude of my anger was out of proportion to its cause.

That’s worth knowing, but it led to something more important: after growing into someone who jealously guarded my ego, my sense of individuality, I realized that my brain hasn’t earned and doesn’t deserve my unthinking trust. That the first step in exerting any reasonable amount of control over yourself is to separate your behavior from your emotions, when you can. That just because you feel angry doesn’t mean that feeling is justified, and if it turns out you’re overreacting because you’re hungry (which happens to me constantly), you need to moderate your reaction compared to when you’ve actually been hurt.

And the other important thing to realize, for the staunch individualist, the iconoclast that hates traditional systems and their expectations, is that viewing your ego with a suspicious eye and moderating your reactions to your own emotions aren’t evidence that you’re selling out, bowing down to some external standard of behavior. Learning to behave this way makes you happier, because as righteously furious as you might feel in the grip of your emotions, being angry all the time is not—no, really—the path to contentment.

This way of thinking of things, diminishing the all-importance of the ego, coincided with discovering (some version of) Buddhist philosophy. That taught me our reactions to negative emotions and events are not only controllable, but are often more damaging than the emotions or events themselves. It also introduced me to the idea that dissatisfaction is inevitable: the myth that we belong on a path towards some idealized state of success and joy is out of touch with reality to a damaging extent. And embracing dissatisfaction helps you approach the things that happen in your life with more deliberation and understanding: you can look for happiness in what you have, or embrace change without fear of stumbling on your continuous ascent towards perfection… because you know that path isn’t real.

And having mentioned the word fear, we come to the final part of what I learned in my twenties: we have met the enemy, and he is us.

I’ve read what Merlin Mann has to say about fear, and what Seth Godin has to say about the Lizard Brain, and finally what Stephen Pressfield has to say about Resistance, and I cling to those ideas like driftwood, because if there’s one thing that’s keeping me from doing any number of things, trivial or momentous, that I want to do, it is fear. And I’ve hardly started living my life as an exemplar of fearlessness, but I feel like I’ve identified the problem, at least, and can try and try to bend my will towards improving.

And that brings us back to the revelation my Mom casually mentioned on the phone: nothing is harder than fighting fear, and nothing improves in your life unless you try it and fail and then try again, and that’s the most frightening course of action possible. So learning to accept that it will always be a struggle is necessary. You might not succeed, and you certainly won’t always be happy. But you ought to try anyway, and sooner than later. Because the only alternative is to huddle in fearful tepidity until pretty soon you die.

That’s what I’m looking forward to at thirty, then, I suppose: a struggle. Because I’ve learned and accepted that there is nothing else true. And I feel better about that than I ever did at twenty, when I still assumed, though I would have denied it at the time, that what came next was happily ever after.