“Ryan P. Randall’s website”
Here’s a bit of what I’ve been up to lately (specifically, I’m writing this on 2026-02-19).
/ai page to this site.I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Sunday, so ISO Week Week 05 is the week of 2026-01-26/2026-02-01. (But as this is my first weeknote of the year, I’ll touch a bit on all of January, too.)
I did a lot of digital puttering over the weekend, mostly customizing the footer by adding some links and a couple buttons: one associated with the People Pledge and another from Andy Carolan of a smiley face and the words “Made By a Human”. (It took a bit of time toying with image color dropper tools and WebAIM’s color contrast checker to determine that the light blue background has by far the best color contrast—and that sadly neither the green nor the orange had high enough contrast for me to use them.)
/ai PageThat “Made by a Human” links to a new /ai page here, which outlines How I Do—and Mostly Do Not—Use “AI” Tools. It grew from being a simple “nope, none here” to a more substantial mini-essay about what I think are some necessary contexts for thinking about AI use.
In particular, I’ve been thinking about considering AI use symptomatically for a while now, as well as thinking about this moment where more people are inclined to be curious & attentive to the technology they use as moment charged with opportunities for people to advocate more for what I’m calling “small tools, sociably made”.
(Or perhaps that should be “…sociably produced”? I feel like the first version is snappier, but the second emphasizes processes of production more; I of course appreciate emphasizing processes. I’d be thrilled to hear which resonates more with you, if you feel so inclined.)
I’m sure I’ll be writing more little essays about those topics soon enough, especially since I’ll be co-facilitating a “faculty learning community” on developing a framework for use of generative “AI” tools this semester.
Beyond those, I also added a /slashes page and a /changelog, where you can find out even more of what I’ve been tinkering with and changing on here lately.
For, as Ethan Marcotte memorably put it, “let a website be a worry stone.”
We’ve been watching The West Wing, having started it back in December. It’s my first time watching it beyond a few clips, and I’m certainly enjoying it. Some of the episodes are truly phenomenal—most recently in our viewing, I’m thinking of “The Long Goodbye” in particular, which I think could easily work viewed all on its own, without any necessary context.
We also watched Groundhog Day. I haven’t seen it in probably more than a decade, and my spouse doesn’t think she’d ever seen it. I couldn’t remember the way it ended, only a few tidbits here and there. I also had totally forgotten it was a Harold Ramis film!
I’m about halfway through Moby-Dick, which I began reading along with a group of people on Bsky organized by Jacobharr.is.
Although I’ve owned a copy for a while, it’s my first time actually reading it. I equivocated about putting both it and Benito Cereno on my exam reading lists, but ultimately decided that they were a bit too early for the time period I really wanted to cover. (There’s a good chance that they’ll each sneak into the dissertation itself, of course.)
The Norton Critical Edition asserts that the name “Davy Jones”—as in the phrase “Davy Jones’ locker”—comes from the Black Caribbean word “duppy” (i.e. “ghost”) and “Jonah” (i.e. “the Biblical person who met with the insides of a whale and lived to tell the tale”).
That’s not a etymological lineage possibility I’ve ever encountered before, but it strikes me as very plausible—at least as plausible as the OED’s assertion that “Davy” is likely from Welsh sailors invoking St. David. In any case, it’s fascinating to learn another possible taken-for-granted Black Atlantic connection.
Anyways, about midway through January, Life Happened To Me and I decided that keeping up with the other Bsky readers was less important than a couple of other projects, so that reading has taken a back seat for the last week or 10 days. The group read was a very productive intervention in my daily patterns, though, helping give me a place to focus my attention when doomscrolling beckoned (and here I’m referring both the book itself and the feed of reactions or insights from other readers).
The Hidden Acid four track release deftly negotiates the lines between techno and house, plugging along with a pleasant motorik pulse. If you’re a fan of 303 synth leads, you’ll find lots to enjoy—and if you don’t have a clue what “acid” or “303” might refer to here, these tunes are wonderful introductions.
Sometime over the last couple months—most likely in the Betwixtmas, somewhere between Boxing Day and New Year’s—I thought long & hard about which pomodoro-style timer I might prefer to keep in the new year. I’ve used & liked LlamaLife & Focus—they’re both great, and Focus especially so if you have an Apple Watch.
But I realized that with each of them, every day felt a little Groundhog Day-ish, because neither really promotes the sense that your focus & effort is adding up over spans of days, weeks, or months.
I’d seen Focumon mentioned as another alternative and decided to give it a try. Having used it over the holidays and all through January, I can say that it’s definitely a solid contender. It’s working well enough that I stopped my other subscriptions and will be using it this year, as least though my exams. (I appreciate that the developer promises it will remain free to use, and it’s already been useful enough that I’m actually paying for an account.)
Getting to see the development of the little pocket monsters and have them build up the strength to take on bosses on different levels provides just enough long-term growth to help me recognize that I’m building toward larger goals.
The minimal co-working in other people’s “training centers” also provides just enough sociability to keep me on track.
LlamaLife, Focus, and Focumon are all solid choices, each slightly better at some things than at others. If you think that you could benefit from extra reinforcement that your daily efforts are adding up to something larger over time, I’d certainly suggest watching the Focumon “About” FAQ video and gauging whether it’s worth trying out. (That’s not an affiliate link, by the way!) The same FAQ page also has product comparisons tucked away at the bottom, such as this comparison with Habitica.
Whether or not these three options are up your alley, I hope you find something that works for you!
]]>It involved stitching together patterns gleaned from posts like Darek Kay’s Style your RSS feed and Rees’ Using jekyll-feed + XSLT with GitHub Pages.
Andrew Stiefel’s How to Style an Atom Feed with XSLT is what I’ve currently adopted/adapted. Doing so means switching from using the popular Jekyll-Feed plugin to Andrew’s Liquid-based feed generators.
(No matter what I tried yesterday, my attempts to style the Jekyll-Feed plugin’s output either left the feed entirely unstyled or it was generated with styles, but the styles introduced validation errors that prevented the feed from actually displaying with content in the browser. There’s a good chance that these problems are ultimately due to user error and only “wrong” in my development Jekyll environment… but having spent hours trying to sort it out, switching seems like the path forward.)
So that brings us to this post! I’m checking whether the new approach:
Put on your goggles and PPE, everyone! The test is about to begin!
Yesterday’s attempt worked nicely—but I noticed an important difference between the preview visible in the browser and in NetNewsWire! Each post’s title was visible in the browser page, but it wasn’t there in NetNewsWire.
I’ve just updated the Liquid-based logic on my feed pages with the <entry> code used by Jekyll-feed. It starts at line 72 and ends at line 126 in their current code.
For the Semi-schematic feed, which contains just a single category of this blog’s posts, I added another Liquid if statement so it would output only posts assigned to that category. That’s at line 21 of this site’s feed-semi-schematic.xml file. Just sharing in case anyone is digging through this site’s source code and trying to figure out how to adapt this for your own site.
The best titles, like the best jokes, don’t need explanation. “Semi-schematic” feels almost self-explanatory, but at the risk of being overly didactic, I’m referring to:
This series of posts will be akin to a professional newsletter, focusing on education-related topics like learning, teaching, instructional design, education technology, and human uses of information. These posts already have their very own Semi-schematic RSS feed!
In addition to my own thoughts, you can expect me to amplify or respond to other people’s work. Education—by which I mean both our institutionalized and self-lead systems for learning—are undergoing myriad changes and challenges. We’ll all likely understand what’s going on far better if we share our insights and perspectives.
I’ll also mention activities like the Navigating Privacy Issues with Generative AI Panel I participated in, or attending the Open Education Conference.
Fun fact: I almost called this newsletter “Buttoned Up”, since I’ll likely also post “wrap ups” amplifying other people’s works, it’s the most “professional” or “buttoned up” I’m likely to be on this site, and because Buttondown is one of the platforms I’d consider use if I were ever to start using an email newsletter platform instead of just adding a category of posts to this site.
]]>I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 36 is the week of 2025-09-01/2025-09-07.
This week I’ve been experimenting with Webmentions, using the Webmentions for Jekyll gem. Reilly Spitzfaden’s A Quick Guide to Everything I Know about Webmentions has proven incredibly helpful and encouraging—thank you so much for writing up this tutorial, Reilly!
As far as I can tell through the Webmention.rocks test suite I’ve got Webmentions working. These webmentions can be displayed automatically, but having seen very nasty abuse, in addition to your garden-variety spam, via pingbacks, I’m still keen to moderate everything that might show up on my site.
I’ve connected Webmentions to my HCommons.social Mastodon account, meaning that I’ll be informed of likes, comments, or reposts of any posts I put there with links to things on my own website. The service that enables this connection, Bridgy, also makes it possible to automatically publish a Mastodon post when I publish something on my website—and as cool as that is, I’d prefer to post things manually, at least for the moment. I’d probably feel different if I wanted to connect my site to more external social media platforms.
Love, Untangled is a sweet, gentle, and (mostly) fun high school story set in late ’90s Busan. (I write “mostly” because there are brief depictions of domestic abuse and suicidal ideation; proceed accordingly and take care of yourselves, friends.) Awkwardness, unexpected honesty, unprovoked meanness—it definitely reminds me of my own high school memories, more compellingly than most similar stories.
The 10 Years of Acid Test compilation has been the main soundtracks on our speakers and headphones this week. As far as I can tell, the songs on it are exclusive—and fantastic, provided you like squelchy electronic rhythm box jams.
I’m re-reading The Order of Things for my exam lists and dissertation project, having read all but a couple chapters of it in a graduate seminar about 20 years ago. So far on this re-read, I’m already able to better see how Foucault’s project fits conceptually into both his own trajectory and alongside other thinkers of his time. A very good feeling!
This week I (re)learned…
]]>I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 35 is the week of 2025-08-25/2025-08-31.
As much as I’m a huge proponent of digital notes, this week I’ve been keeping a 3.5” x 5” notebook open as I read books by Chu, Benjamin, and Foucault. I type so much more quickly than I write that having a keyboard at hand invites me to quote extensively, while the relative friction of a paper notebook helps me instead make bullet points of my condensations, summaries, and reactions.
This strategy might be what Sönke Ahrens would call “fleeting notes”—although perhaps not exactly, since I do plan to keep these little notebooks. In any case, the experiment certainly seems to be helping me read faster, and focusing less on each individual detail and more on the overall structure or argument.
We’ll see how well this works going forward.
The new-to-me music I’m digging this week is definitely Tin Man. In particular, I’ve got DrippingAcid on replay. (I sort of stumbled onto him via Acid Test Records, which I almost certainly encountered because it’s the label that releasd Om Unit + TM404’s collaboration In The Afterworld.)
Speaking of paper notes, I enjoyed Ellane W’s The Surprisingly Powerful One-Page Notebook That’s Always With Me. She sings the praises of folding up a sheet of paper into a one-page notebook (1PN) to tote along as an intentionally constrained alternative to any more substantial notebook you might use.
I often do the same thing, only I tear out the middle seams to make a one-page mini zine-style booklet. (I initially started doing this to reuse discarded misprints at my former library job. Knowing only one side of the paper was usable might be why I got in the habit of adding the zine-style tears?) I particularly like Ellane’s suggestion of digitizing whatever you find useful in one of these one page notebooks (or 1PNs). The brevity definitely helps you remember to move from paper to digital sooner than with longer pocket notebooks!
Tracy Durnell’s What to read? Big questions as filter and frame helped me re-think how I’m approaching my own reading. It also makes me want to start writing down my own big questions. Maybe I’ll end up making public pages of these here, much as she does?
Franklin S’s weekly note—which thinks with both Donna Haraway and Ursula K. Le Guin—is not that far off from this type of “big questions”.
It’s exciting—moreover, it’s heartening and encouraging—to read Franklin’s musings on what he’s thinking through during his sabbatical and to see him share with thoughts-in-process, the things he’s working through and with as he’s trying to address his questions.
Maybe this kind of “big picture” framing happens at the beginning of the academic year, for those of us who live on that kind of cycle?
This week I (re)learned…
I noticed that the screen reader text for each of the heading links was visible on this site. A few minutes of digging in the Minimal Mistakes theme repository’s “Issues” area let me know what had changed and how to fix it for my own site.
Although I use the remote theme method for my site, I’ve edited the CSS files enough that I had to add the changes into my own local version of that file. (With the remote theme method, any local versions of a file override the remote theme’s version.) I might eventually take the time to move all my customizations into a different file so that my site will better pull in this kind of fix—but even with the time spent realizing the issue and manually fixing it, I’m a big fan of this approach to maintaining a site and of the maintainers whose labor makes it happen.
]]>Here’s some of what I’m currently doing, as of Spring 2025. (More specifically, I’m writing this on 2025-05-08):
progress_current.if you went to college
- what was your career goal when you started?
- your initial major?
- if you changed majors, what did you change to?
- what do you do now, professionally?
- i was interested in genetics but unsure
- History
- Never changed
- Writer/creating writing prof
Here’s my response, which not only demonstrates my usual predilection to wrap social media posts up in tidy little bows, but also contains enough durable insight that I felt it worth sharing here:
- I didn’t truly have one yet? I was just thrilled to be at a school where people wanted to be at school‽?!
- Philosophy (not sure I ever declared it as a major, but I got it as a minor).
- English Lit.
- Instructional Design (i.e. helping students & professors continue wanting to be at school).
Then I added:
(Aaand because I’ve mostly done Cultural / American Studies, I know how many structural problems higher ed as set of institutions is oriented toward perpetrating.
But it’s also one of the best places, outside of social media, for creating an undercommons for our collective study toward liberation.)
If you’re unfamiliar with the idea of The Undercommons, the link in this sentence takes you to a freely downloadable version of the book.
Assuming that I remember correctly from when I first read it, I found The Undercommons both a deeply frustrating and very useful work. Fred Moten, one of the authors, is a poet and a critical theorist. I suspect that the book’s avoidance of early definition of terms is an intentional provocation to keep you reading (and also, perhaps, to avoid making it come across as alienatingly “theoretical” or “fixed”). Rather than closing off potential paths, it feels like the authors deliberately chose to leave enough space for readers to find resonance, ideas to play with, and mentally collaborate as they wish.
If you’re sensing musical overtones—particularly of a jazz improv variety—then just let me share that In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition was the first piece I read by Moten. That, plus having seen him speak once or twice at UC Irvine and elsewhere in Southern California, probably influence how his works resonate in my mind.
Invitations to an audience; provocations to take up the pieces and do something with them; these very much speak to atypical aspects of instructional design and teaching where one tries to maintain an open space for collaboration and connection, rather than just delivering static knowledge.
I’ll be re-reading hooks, Freire, and Giroux this year—as well as many newer people who discuss pedagogy and instruction from complementary perspectives—and I’ll keep trying to trace these connections and echoes as I find them.
]]>I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 03 is the week of 2025-01-13/2025-01-19.
People I follow on social media started widely discussing Substack’s Nazi problems anew this week. I’m going to do a more substantial dive into the problems & the alternatives in another post—but the clear winner in terms of newsletter-based alternatives has been Ghost.
It has been really encouraging to see how many people have been thinking about ways to move themselves away from the sturm und drang and churn of social media toward spaces that they can control better, both as readers and writers!
If you’ve recently started a newsletter or website—or if you’ve begun posting anew—please let me know! There are many ways to participate in what might be called the cozy web, the personal web, the IndieWeb, the lowercase indie web, etc., and I’d love to read whatever you might be making.
Sometimes I rediscover and readopt techniques that have worked for me in the past, and although I can’t recall just why or how, I was lead to re-acquaint myself with what I’d call the extended Pomodoro Technique this week.
In addition to timing myself working in bursts (what many people consider the Pomodoro Technique), I also have started listing the tasks that I’m aiming to complete in a day, then tracking how many timed bursts those selected tasks take me.
Me being me, this is mostly happening in my daily bullet-journal style notes in Obsidian—but I’m also using and enjoying Llama Life for the timer part of this. It syncs to my phone and has a web view that plays extremely nicely with Rectangle, the window position manager I adore for Macintosh.
I’ve always enjoyed The Twilight Zone, and my admiration for Rod Serling grows whenever I learn something new about him and his ethos. Up until now, however, I’ve only ever watched The Twilight Zone randomly, such as being assigned an episode as part of a film / television / media course, having a friend want to watch, or just landing on it while flipping channels (back when channel-flipping was Very Much A Thing).
After recently concluding our ViewingAlpha of Star Trek, my spouse and I have been looking for something with vaguely similar vibes. Although The Twilight Zone is far more episodic than later Star Trek series, it has a very similar “logic puzzle” to the original.
So we’re embarking on a first watch of all of the original series of The Twilight Zone. If I come up with a clever name, I’ll add it retroactively—and I’ll post about (or at least mention) any episode highlight as we come across them.
I’m impressed by how rapidly it hit its stride, with some of the most famous episodes happening within the first 10—including time travel, a deal with the literal Devil, a nuclear apocalypse, a convict living on a remote asteroid, an android, and various encounters with fate. As a slice of late 1950s America, an evolutionary moment within television, an overview of sci-fi/fantasy/horror, and legal/criminal/psychological/social discourses, it’s a profoundly rich series already!
]]>I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 02 is the week of 2024-01-06/2025-01-12.
Even though I’m writing this on Jan 19th, a full week after Week02 has ended, I do think I’ll be ridiculous enough to aim at posting 100 things this calendar year, as I shared in last week’s weeknote. I’m realizing that, despite how much time I spend on social media, I find myself far happier after spending time reading short-form writing on blogs and digital gardens than spending the same amount of time scrolling an endless feed.
So I’m hoping that writing my own posts will give me a similar sense of fulfillment and community, as well as help me contribute reasons for others to spend more time in RSS readers (should that similarly suit them).
This means I’ll aim to average writing a weeknote and just one additional note each week this calendar year, which isn’t that big of an undertaking if I choose to think of smaller, breezier increments instead of larger, heftier chunks.
“Rally pace” always springs to mind when I think about this sort of mile-marking. I’m doing similar calculations for how many books or articles I’ll need to be reading each week in order to get through all my reading lists, which is another reason to steer myself towards sharing my own thoughts more frequently.
If you’re doing something similar, I’d love to hear about it—especially if you’re just starting out with a blog or other space of your own online!
This week we watched more movies than in a typical week.
We saw:
Even a week later, I keep thinking of snippets of each of them.
Downsizing surprised us the most, since Netflix’s preview card led us to anticipate it primarily being a Jason Sudeikis joint, when the biggest role actually is performed by some dude named Matt Damon. Despite (or due to?) not being at all what we expected (most likely some kind of midlife crisis Honey I Shrunk the Kids meet the Good Place), it’s the one that has stuck with me most vividly.
I finished Hayot’s Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. this week, as well as starting Richards’ The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire.
Hayot’s Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. feels like something we’ve needed—or at least I’ve needed—for quite some time to help us explain the actual processes we perform, and the beliefs attested to by our behaviors, when doing work in the humanities. I’m planning to write more about it in the next few weeks.
I’d highly recommend it to anyone who cares about human knowledge, whether or not they think they care about those disciplines called “the humanities”.
As I’m writing this, I’m about halfway through Richards’ The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire—and I’m very grateful that Past Me chose to put it on my lists.
Librarians and archivists have well-earned skepticism toward people who write about “the archive” without much engagement with actual archives or archivists, but I think that reaction would be displaced here.
Richards does an excellent job of explaining that he’s analyzing the cultural work performed by the fantasy of “an archive” of knowledge allied with the (British) state, and the influences of this primarily-imagined network. I’d also recommend it to anyone interested in knowledge, archives, or information networks, but it’s likely not to feel as groundbreaking as Hayot’s for most readers.
]]>I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 01 is the week of 2024-12-30/2025-01-05. (Yes, this includes a bit of 2024, as confusing as that is. Time, am I right?)
It had been a very long time since I’d taken a substantial enough vacation to truly disengage from work! I finally dislodged my mind from work over the holidays, though, thankfully.
Having re-learned the crucial necessity of rest by gaining some distance from work, I’m going to try bringing a better sense of proportion & perspective into the new year.
I also made some physical progress charts for my reading lists, hanging them in a place where I pass by them constantly. Seeing this little reminder has already been motivating in a way that feels like self-led accomplishment rather than shame. That’s another revelation!
As far as books go, over the break I read:
Over the break, I also was reminded of the 100 Days to Offload blogging challenge, via Stefan Bohacek’s Recurring creative challenges site. I think I’ll try this “post 100 things on your own site, no matter how small” challenge this year as a way of encouraging myself to do far more frequent, smaller chunks of writing.
Let the experimentation begin!
]]>It’s fairly nerdy and detailed.
And if that description also applies to you, hopefully this note arrives just in time to add it up before you kiss off this year!
]]>I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 47 is the week of 2024-11-18/2024-11-24. (And I’m publishing this a full week later than I usually aspire to for a weekly round-up like this!)
The biggest update this week is that I’ll be doing my second teaching internship next semester! My PhD program requires two supervised teaching internships (or externships, although internships seem more common).1
This internship will let me work with Dr. Curt Whitaker on teaching an asynchronous online Gen Ed course on ecocriticism, or how human relationships to the natural world have been represented through literature. My pedagogy-related readings with him will also focus on how instructors can adapt their assessment strategies in light of GenAI.2 I’m really looking forward to it!
Perhaps it was because I had ecocriticism on my mind, or perhaps it was because we actually decided to start watching a movie early enough to choose a long one, but we finally watched Interstellar for the first time.
Although it’s not already on my exam reading lists, there’s a strong chance I’ll end up writing about it in my dissertation or somewhere else, as it’s a very clear example of framing “information” in deeply humanistic ways.
We also managed to watch both the original Mean Girls (2004) and the 2024 movie musical version. It’s fascinating to see who returns from the original cast (hey, Tim Meadows! yep, Tina Fey, too!), as well as how much more inclusive the writing and casting have become. Thankfully, there are far fewer fat-shaming jokes. The songs, performances, and choreography are all wonderful additions as well. And—omg—because we’ve been living under a large boulder the size of a small boulder, I did not realize who Auli’i Cravalho is until after we finished it. Such a delight to see the voice of Moana in a live-action production!
Inspired by Thomas Rigby’s It’s Hard to Give Recognition blog post, I’ve added Tinylytics to my site.
It’s taken a bit of tweaking with Liquid code logic and page layouts to get the “kudos” feature to show up appropriately, but it feels well worth the time.
We also put together proposals for each internship, giving us authentic experience writing in the “academic proposal” genre that’s otherwise quite rare to come by for humanities scholars. ↩
I’ll likely make a separate note for my internship reading list soon enough. I’ll try to remember to update this post if I do. ↩
I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 46 is the week of 2024-11-11/2024-11-17.
It’s been rolling around in my mind for a while, and this thought finally took a succinct form:
Languaging about something is very different from knowing about something.
This isn’t a groundbreaking insight to those of us with rhetoric, composition, media, communication, or cultural studies backgrounds, but it definitely does seem to be a novel insight to far too many people who uncritically teach information literacy or generative artificial “intelligence” tools.
“Language” as a verb can encompass everything from the media frames examined by Cultural Studies scholars through to what rhetoric and composition studies scholars like Asao B. Inoue have examined at length. (A relatively short and engaging example is Dr. Inoue’s Chair’s Address from the 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication: How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, Or What Do We Do About White Language Supremacy?.)
I wrote & submitted a proposal for the second of the two internships required for my English PhD program! (There’s a reasonably strong chance that I’ll need to revise the proposal, as it’s an atypical course, but we’ll see.)
If it works out, I’ll be asynchronously teaching an online course about Nature in Literature with Dr. Curt Whitaker, with whom I’ve previously taken a graduate seminar on Ecocriticism in the Renaissance. This internship course’s readings will be quite different, as it’s a Gen Ed elective and the bulk of the works are from last 100 years or so.
In addition to the literature, I’ll be reading & discussing recent research into generative artificial “intelligence”. This will be both from the angle of assessment of student work and of more broadly how these “GenAI” tools might fit into education.
I’m on the editorial board of In the Library with the Lead Pipe, and we’ve been working for a while on crafting a policy that reflects our concerns about generative AI while also recognizing that there are a range of uses for these tools.
We published the journal’s AI policy, and have thus far received a warm response from our readers. That’s really heartening. I’ve also gotten some useful feedback on how the policy might be improved, too, which I’ll be sure to share with the other editors as we continue making refinements.
Yep, we watched Hot Frosty. It was fun; very Encino Man meets The Knight Before Christmas, although the main character is played with more of a Manny Jacinto vibe. (It’s honestly a shame that the main character wasn’t actually played by Manny Jacinto, now that I think more about it.)
I read another few chapters of Policing the Crisis, and it’s both disturbing and enlightening how applicable much of the analysis continues to be to our current times.
I’m increasingly glad I chose to add it to the first of my Ph.D. exam reading lists, the one about information control and making meaning.
We’ve also been watching Season 3 of Heartstopper, which is fantastic and—as anticipated—somewhat heavier than the previous seasons.
I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Sunday, so ISO Week 45 is the week of 2024-11-04/2024-11-10.
I’ve been using espanso, a free text expander utility, for the last few month. It’s working out very well!
One can install espanso just by downloading the app from their website, but I took the “install using Homebrew” route, because using command line tools like Homebrew is the particular flavor of nerdom which afflicts me.
Setting up espanso, whether as an app or via Homebrew, does require a bit of comfort with the command line and the configuration files are written in YAML format. In other words, it might not be the most intuitive for a general audience. But if you’re already familiar with those things, or willing to stretch your comfort zone a bit, it’s a very handy utility that can save a lot of repetitive typing. I’d certainly recommend it—especially if you use multiple machines and want to sync your configuration files between them using something like Dropbox (which I use), Google Drive, GitHub, or etc.
Starting on Halloween, we watched all of the first season of Goosebumps. It’s only 10 episodes, so we’ve already finished it. It definitely seemed to help deal with processing the election news.
Our Star Trek “Viewing Alpha” is also basically caught up to the current productions, meaning we’re up to the current season of Lower Decks.
Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds have all been enjoyable—although Discovery’s first season was honestly a slog, to the point that we almost gave up on watching everything Star Trek. Redemption narratives and torture scenes are both pretty far from our preferred fare, and I’m still not certain why the producers made the choices they did for the first season in particular. Strange New Worlds is definitely the type of hopepunk / cosmospolitanism that we look for when we turn to Star Trek.
The main thing I’ve been reading has been Policing the Crisis. Its chapters feel deeply pertinent as a set of lenses to better understand at least the last decade in the United States, including reactions to Black Lives Matter and how the most recent national election played out.
I first got into dub reggae in early high school, spurred on by learning that it had been a huge influence on groups as varied as Bark Psychosis, Seefeel, Massive Attack, and Portishead, as well as hearing some at local record stores. At this point, dub has been a thing I turn to when stressed for decades. (In particlar, I love this Dub Over Dub compilation of Errol Brown’s dubs of Treasure Island and Channel One tunes.)
Although I’ve been aware of 2Tone ska’s complex relationship with with punk, post-punk, and new wave since becoming a fan in high school, I’ve only in the last few years have gotten around to intentionally learning about the UK-based dub and reggae groups like Dub Syndicate who turned out tunes during the 1980s and in turn influenced not just the aforementioned groups, but also Warp Records, Orbital, and B12 style UK techno.
The Pounding System, Dub Syndicate’s 1982 debut album, features players from Creation Rebel and African Head Charge, with some of their tunes sounding quite recognizable as the starting points here.
If bass music, or dub in particular, are things that speak to you when times get tough, this might well be worth your time. I’m looking forward to slowly moving through the rest of Dub Syndicate & related On-U Sound groups.
Finally, we’ve also been frequently playing the board game Dominion as a way to switch our brains away from stressful things. (There have been many stressful things, which partially explains why this is my first post in a couple months.)
Since we’re aiming for quicker games most evenings, our house rules “Do-mini” variant uses only 6 copies of each card. This keeps our games closer to 30 minutes, instead of the full hour or more we tend to take for the official rules version with 10 copies of each card.
]]>As it turns out, I apparently do indeed have some favorite ways other people do this on their personal sites. To keep this list easier to find in the future, I figured I’d turn my quick response to him into a slightly-longer blog post.
A lot of people tend to have a pretty grid of book covers without their own notes, but with each cover linking to Bezos’s commerce site. That’s one way to track your reading, and I do usually appreciate the eye candy or occasional overall rating included in this approach.
I’m really more interested in people’s thoughts and feelings, though. So I prefer some sort of written summary or reaction.
It’s also very kind to put all one’s book notes in a single place, rather than interspersed in your blog posts. Blog posts are a great approach, of course, and I fully intend to do more reading reactions in posts here! But the examples below all take a more “digital garden” approach, even if some of them are still blog-ish.
If you haven’t already seen Mandy Brown’s A Working Library, you’re in for a treat. will usually have a few posts about a single book, and occasionally a sort of combo post that connects to a few. I really like her approach & site!
On Tom MacWright’s Reading page, he usually writes one overview review of a book. He doesn’t frequently situate it along other works—but I like encountering someone else’s thoughts in this format.
On Derek Siver’s Books I’ve Read page, he provides a succinct overview excerpt, and then each title also has a page with his notes. It’s nice how the index page can be re-sorted by title, newest, or best.
The notes on each book’s page do often feel more like they’re written for him rather than for another person, since I can’t quite tell if he’s copying & pasting or what, but hey—it’s his site! I’m just glad to poke around what he’s read sometimes!
Tom Critchlow has a number of book-related things in his Jekyll-based wiki, including a page linking to digital bookshelves he admires, a number of other book-related notes, an idea for a JSON-based alternative to Goodreads, and finally, his own books read page.
His summaries are quite brief, and feel written mostly as reminders-to-himself, and I mean that in a way that I appreciate.
Although it’s a prime example of the “mostly an eye-candy grid” approach, I really like the way that Mapple Appleton’s website contains both a library of books she’s “read that significantly influenced” how she sees the world and an antilibrary of books she likes “the idea of having read”.
The idea of giving yourself this antilibrary’s kind of “things I find interesting but probably won’t do” sort of list somehow simultaneously breaks my brain and chills it out. Based on that alone, these pages feel worth mentioning. I also like the selections on each list! I just can’t help but wish she provided her site’s visitors with some kind of annotation or brief snippet of her own thoughts on each. What can I say? I guess I’m nosy, greedy, or probably a bit of both.
I don’t typically end blog posts with the “what about you, reader?” type of conclusion that seemed very common in the first big wave of blogging I remember reading. Partially that’s because it can sometimes feel formulaic, and partially that’s just because I haven’t always had comments enabled on here.
With this topic, I would certainly love to learn what other people are doing. I’m still curious about other answers to Jacky’s question, so I don’t want to write a “conclusion”—I want to keep the question in play!
Have you seen other great examples? Have you made your own and want to share? Please let me know, here, on Mastodon, or however else makes sense to you.
]]>I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week 31 is the week of 2024-07-29/2024-08-04.
This week I started reading Malka Older’s Infomocracy—which is so engrossing that I’m only finally getting around to posting these sparse notes on Thursday!
Although it’s less pleasurable reading, Zeb Palmer’s Idaho Fire newsletter has been a great place for getting news and analysis of all the wildfires happening in the Intermountain West. Zeb’s been providing fire information on Mastodon and elsewhere for years, so it’s great to see those efforts turn into something more centralized onto its own platform.
The newsletter is made using Ghost, which means that you can subscribe to it via email or RSS.
This week I learned some great words and concepts:
I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week 30 is the week of 2024-07-22/2024-07-28.
Emma Stone stars in Easy A, a film inspired by (and earnestly referencing) The Scarlet Letter. It is set and entirely shot in Ojai, California.
Among the other great actors, it has Malcolm McDowell in a minor role as the school principal. This casting is extra fun because my friend Andrew, who grew up in Ojai, was very proud of having McDowell be (in Andrew’s learned opinion) the second-most famous celebrity who chose to live in Ojai (Sergio Aragonés, the Mad magazine cartoonist, was the first).
Yep, we’re streaming some of the Olympics online!
This week I (re)learned…
I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week 29 is the week of 2024-07-15/2024-07-21.
We’ve been watching Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper a bit this week, and it’s really enjoyable. My spouse has been watching it more attentively than I have (I’ve often been reading as she watches), but I watched all of the Palm Springs episode and like it enough that I’m planning to re-watch the whole series with her.
Hyperlocal psychogeography isn’t a show or anything; I’ve just been taking walks around the neighborhood far earlier in the morning due to the current heat wave, and the shift in time has led me to pay newfound attention to the built environment while I do so.
Psychogeography has long been a fave practice of mine, ever since I first read about the Situationists. It’s an always-there method for adopting beginner’s mind even amid what could otherwise feel like profoundly familiar surroundings.
If I take a particularly long walk, there’s a corner where you can see Bogus Basin Road winding up into the Boise Foothills on its way to Bogus Basin and further beyhond. The switch from tree-lined streets nestled in the Treasure Valley and the greater Snake River Plain to seeing a gateway to the mountains north of town can be quite jarring—and often inspires a welcome and unexpected sense of possibility early in the day!
Reading Microfeatures I love in Blogs and Personal Websites last week inspired me to search for ways to add external link indicators to my site.
There are a number of plugins that let one do this with Jekyll, but many of them require intentionally annotating either internal or external links with extra tags. I’m wary of adding features that will require me to go back and change almost a decade of posts, so instead I searched for simpler approaches. I was discouraged at first that all the plugins or approaches I found were focused on the ability to force external links to open in a new tab, a behavior which often poses accessibility challenges, so that’s not an approach I want to add.
When I found MichaelDot’s Adding Ability to Open External Links in New Tab Minimal Mistakes Jekyll blog post, I realized that I could adapt his JavaScript code to annotate the links without also forcing the “new tab” behavior. Thankfully, my spouse had time to help me go through and make sure that I understood all of what this small script does, so I feel comfortable adding it to my site.
I’ve chosen an upward-right facing arrow that doesn’t include the usual “box” element, to hopefully indicate that it’s an internal link but not one that will hijack your browser and create a new tab.
I will probably go back and add an ARIA label to indicate these external links—but I’m currently hesitant because I’ve often heard accessibility experts say that no ARIA is better than bad ARIA… and I’ll want to carefully consider whether whatever I end up adding is worth the risk of doing it poorly.
But for now, you’re very welcome to adopt or adapt my site’s external-link-indicator.js file (which determines which links are external and adds an appropriate class to the html) and the following css rule (which adds the visual decoration).
.page__content a.external-link:not(nav a.external-link, div.backlink-box a.external-link)::after {
content: " ↗";
font-size: .7rem;
}
If you do end up using this—and especially if you add your own refinements or improvements—I’d love to hear about it!
]]>Although I’ve had a 7” read along book of this Disney movie since I was a child, this was the first time I can ever remember watching it. My wife couldn’t remember ever even hearing of the film before!
It’s an odd combination of German Expressionist cinematography and set design, vague “haunted castle” / foreboding “sinister mansion” / doomed “disaster ship” vibes, late 1970s Star Wars / post-_2001_ aesthetics, and an amazingly recognizable cast.
I wouldn’t exactly recommend it, especially as the film’s plot eventually just dissolves into “cinematic / psychedelic experience”. However, it is entertaining in a “wow, Disney in the 1970s was a different beast” way, as well as adding interesting differences between popular science fiction treatment of cyborgs and purely constructed automata.
Ever since some close friends lived in Toronto while we lived in Rochester, we’ve been in the habit of vaguely celebrating Canada Day, usually with homemade poutine (or our easier to make nacho/poutine concoction) and some CanCon media.
This film was recommended as a “dark comedy”, but very little of it amounts to laughing types of humor. It’s wry and interesting, but more of a vague apocalyptic art house film about humans making meaning of their lives than an actual comedy.
I’m glad to have seen it—especially as a reminder of all the times I’ve gone to see little art films, mostly when living in Riverside and Rochester—but I doubt I’ll watch it again. Seeing Sandra Oh and David Cronenberg was also quite fun.
We busted out a DVD/CD drive to watch this one, and I’m pleased to report that it mostly holds up to my memories of it.