Waiting On the Lightning

Alright, well, that little experiment didn’t survive its first encounter with the enemy.¹ I haven’t totally abandoned the whole playlist-post thing, but I don’t think it’s going to be a regular weekly feature. In fact, I don’t anything’s going to be a regular weekly feature anymore. There isn’t much point in beating myself up over failing to meet a self-imposed deadline about a fucking hobby.

It’s been the customary six-ish months since the last post around here. I’ve got some ideas to use this thing more often – maybe now that I’m out of the winter doldrums, they might even come to fruition. Or, this is just another lightning-quick flash in the pan that I’ve been waiting for, not realising that it would disappear as quickly as it comes.

Either way, I’ve been up to a couple of things. For one thing, I started a new job! It’s technically an old job. You probably don’t care about that, and I don’t blame you. There are far more interesting things to talk about.

podcast

After years of certain people (you know who you are) shouting at me that I need a podcast, I’ve finally gone and done it. My friend Noëlle re-launched er podcast, Idle Curiosities, and I’m the new co-host. Every week, we talk about things from our internet search history and what we learned as a result. I’ve been on four episodes so far, if you’re a completionist, but it’s not the sort of show that you need to listen to the entire backlog in order to know what’s going on.

I’ll probably post about new episodes every week here, under the appearances tag. Here’s the first 4 that I haven’t posted yet, for your listening enjoyment:

• 046 - you’re gonna have three vessels
• 047 - cornbread is resillient
• 048 - curveball energy
• 049 - #lizwasright

Being on this show is fun as all hell – even if nobody listened, talking to one of my closest friends every week and discovering what we’ve been searching for is really satisfying. I do hope you give it a listen.

flickr

In February, I went out to Reno for a week and discovered, once again, that I enjoy photography. There’s a cycle I find myself in, and perhaps you’re familiar with it too, where one sinks to such a level of long-term depression and malaise that they forget about hobbies that they enjoy. As far as I can tell, I haven’t picked my digital camera up since 2019, but it turns out that it’s a joy to use, I’m half-decent at it, and I had a lot of fun using it again. Maybe I’ll keep up with it this time around. In the meantime, I’m reëmbracing the halcyon days of early Web 2.0² and have started a new Flickr account to post them on. Twitter’s image compression sucks, Instagram is a dumpster fire, and as far as I’m aware there really isn’t anywhere great to post photography anyway.

a stupid idea i will almost certainly regret

While writing this post, I discovered that my Ruby install broke itself. Again. I’m thinking about moving to a different static site generator. It’ll probably require some massaging to make work, and I’m not looking forward to it, but I think it’s time to stop trying to keep this weird Jekyll setup on life support.