Too Many Books (Is Never Enough)
I love my Kindle. I don’t feel great about that, because Amazon is the devil. But being able to jump on a plane with hundreds of books in a small tablet with a consistently readable font is amazing, and it’s wired into my note-taking flow.
One downside, if you can call it that, is that it’s easy to be reading several books at once, and just flit between them like a reading social butterfly. I exploit that weakness of the system to a painful extent.
Here’s what I’m in the middle of on my Kindle at the moment, and I’m probably forgetting a couple:
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
- How To Lose A Country
- Hope in the Dark
- The Origins of Totalitarianism
- Jane Eyre
- The Code of the Woosters
- Surprised by God
- Atlas of AI
- Plato - A Very Short Introduction
- We Need Your Art
- Talk
- The Well-Educated Mind
Clearly, I need to focus.
Trying Out Blot
Pen on Paper
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
For my new blog, I wanted something simple and low-friction. I’m a software developer by day, and don’t want to make blogging feel like it’s an extension of my job. I want to focus on the writing, not get caught up and dragged down by tools, and not have excuses not to write. That ruled out Wordpress for me; I host a couple of Wordpress sites for non-profits on my Dreamhost account, and even the little bit of security maintenance I have to do for them is too much like work.
There are some great static-site tools out there, like Hugo and Jekyll. Call me lazy, but I wanted something even simpler.
Enter blot. It’s a dead-simple blogging platform. All you do is create a new site from the (bare-bones) admin panel, and tell it where you want to sync the files. I chose Dropbox. It creates a Dropbox folder for you. Anything you put in that folder becomes part of your site. It can read Markdown, HTML, or Docx files.
There are a couple of special-purpose folders you can create:
- drafts is for works-in-progress; nothing in there will be public on the site;
- Pages is for top-level pages, like About or Contact or such;
- Posts is for blog posts. You don’t have to separate posts into their own directory; anything in the top level will go to the site. But I like the organization of having them in their own directory.
Also, any file or folder that starts with an underscore is ignored, so you can, for instance, have an _images folder and reference files in there from your posts, like I did above.
You can put Jekyll-style yaml at the top of your posts, for things like Title, description, tags, etc. There’s a list of the attributes you can set here.
On the dashboard for your site, there’s an “Edit Template” link. From there you can select one of the templates, and customize it a bit.
Analytics, newsletters, etc are not included. There are guides to add Heap or Google Analytics, and Buttondown for newsletters.
That’s really it. I’m writing these posts so far in Visual Studio Code, but any markdown-friendly editor would work.
The cost is $6 a month, which handles the hosting.
So far, for me, it’s the perfect level of very-minimal control, and frictionless writing. By so far, I mean I set it up yesterday. I’ll keep you posted.
“We live in a world,” says Simone Weil, “where people can expect miracles only from themselves.” - from Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom
“Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.” - Rebecca Solnit from Hope in the Dark
It’s been a crazy week
Yesterday was Juneteenth. For the first time, I work at a place that takes a holiday on Juneteenth. Today marks the end of my second week with the new gig.
Last Saturday, I went to my first ever protest. I joined the No Kings protest in St. Pete over by Tyrone Mall. To be honest, I was scared to go, given the over-zealous response to the LA protests. I got there a little late. There were already thousands of people lining the very busy street corner, on all sides. Lots of American flags. I had an instinctive clench when I saw the flags. In recent history, flags and flag-based clothing have been a sign of, well, the other side. Voldemort fanatics. For the first time in a long while I saw the flags, and was able to feel good about it. Even a little proud. I pulled into the first parking lot I could find that had protesters nearby - between a McDonald’s and a Panera Bread. Someone with a walkie-talkie walked out the back door of the Panera, shaking his head. I waited for a moment to make sure he wasn’t calling tow trucks, and then headed across the parking lot to the sidewalk. Three people deep along the street, most people had signs and/or flags. Cars continually honked as they drove by. The location wasn’t like other cities, where all the people were together, so it was hard to get a feeling of mass. It felt a little scattered, like the busy street. But there was a unity that spanned the large intersection. It was hot. Someone came through offering water, and one of the organizers came by a couple of times to start chants with his megaphone. My fears were, as it happened, unfounded. There was a police presence, but just to keep traffic going smoothly. The protesters ranged from 20-yr-olds to 80s. it was peaceful, joyous, angry, loud. Necessary. On the day of Voldemort’s military parade in DC, millions of people took to the streets in protest. I read that it takes only 3.5% of the population to demonstrate regularly, to topple a tyrant. That’s 97 million, in the US. We didn’t get that number, but it’s a start.
There’s another protest day planned on July 17. I encourage you to join.
In the meantime, we may or may not be going to war with Iran. Voldemort says he’ll decide in 2 weeks. Of course, he says that about everything.
Hello!
I’m at a crossroads. For most of my life my identity was tied up with music and sound. I play drums, and flirted with success but we never really consummated. Music went off to flirt with other people, and I was left with tinnitus and a day job as a software developer.
Now I find myself in my (very) late fifties, and need to come alive. Part of this internal renaissance is to read more. I’m reading history, politics, and started a program of reading the Great Books. Also, quite a bit about AI and its implications for our future.
I’ve also been learning languages - I started with Spanish during the pandemic, and also started picking up some German and French.
I’ve started, essentially, trying to cultivate a life of the mind. Something I missed out on by going to a technical institute instead of a university (not realizing the difference), and veering into music.
This is a new blog, as an experiment. To write and to learn in public. To try and make sense of the world, especially the batshit crazy world we’re in right now.