Semi-frequent updates about life and exploration.
Log
Feeding your demons
I’ve long wondered if fighting off your demons, waging battle after battle against your problems, is the best approach. It’s energy intensive and often feels like you’re fighting the tide. As someone with complex post traumatic stress disorder, I felt exhaustion in the marrow of my bones after wading into some of these battles. Maybe I beat back something or achieved some small victory, but it felt like a losing proposition that came at great cost.
Wax stamps
Used a wax stamp for the first time to address thank-you cards. It was beautiful and meditative to slowly watch this rich, luciously colored wax melt and drip, drop by drop, onto some thick and sturdy paper. Maybe I should make my own. Other things of interest are insight systems. Anything related to tangential thinking and how it lead to deep insights fascinates me. So far, it’s looking into astrology, tarot, and bone reading.
Limpiar Sus Huesos
I posted a couple new pieces of art, one inspired by Oppenheimer and the other by old horror films. Paid a visit to Hollywood Forever to experience Dia De Los Muertos. Overwhelmed with the beauty and respect for people’s loved ones. Especially so by the altars dedicated to pets. See more photos here. On that same weekend, I met someone from Oaxaca who told me she and her town grew up doing something called “limpiar sus huesos.
Silver Nitrate, Design as an Attitude
It was a good weekend for movies. TMNT was so good, like it had no business being so good. I have seen way too many “revivals” of nostalgic shows that were boring or lifeless and this wasn’t one of them. In the same weekend I also saw Talk to Me. Horror movie of the year, hands down. What a great, tight story that was. Excited to see the prequel they shot in secret.
Let's get spooky!
My favorite time of year is here. Hooray for spooky season! I updated the site with spooky Halloween colors, too. Red mode on iPhone # I’ve been trying to make reading on my phone as easy as I can, and I remember working in the darkroom a lot in college. It was easy to see in there with a red light and didn’t hurt my eyes. I thought I’d see if iOS had the ability to do this, given that it lets you go greyscale and filters other colors.
Why I redid my site
I had a few reasons for redoing my site. Turns out said reasons fold up nicely inside the concept of something called web sustainability. I learned about this after seeing a W3C’s working group publish a sustainability guidelines report in September of 2023. It resonates deeply and is worth a read. One wild stat they shared was that if the Internet were a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest polluter.
Reorganization and ePubs
Did some reorganization to take advantage of Hugo’s page bundles, which will make updates a little smoother and keep the site tidy. I’d wanted a workflow where I could easily copy/paste from my writing environment directly into Hugo but that proved a little too tricky to set up. ePubs # Turns out, you can make ebooks out of markdown sites. So I turned The Nevermore into an ePub book! It took a lot of work to get how I wanted, but it’s easy enough to do with Pandoc.
The Nevermore and wget
We had a friend over for an introvert art night, basically we whittled time away working on art projects individually. I’d long been considering which collection of Poe’s work I should get, but the editions I’ve seen are shiny and have terrible line length and typesetting. Yes, I am that kind of person. What good is a book if it’s difficult to read? So, having no desire to do physical art, I turned to the world of static site generators.
Sculpture and LACMA
Art # Started in on a clay sculpture. I was inspired by Foundation’s incredible opening credits, and thought it would be fun to sculpt a half human/half bone…thing. So I got some polymer clay, primer, and set to work. Initially I wanted to have it entirely emblazoned with glitter but it really hid the subtle textures I put on the face. So I got some adhesive I could paint on and then applied the glitter.
Markdown to Word Doc, Writing, Notes on Complexity
Writing # I’m considering what to do once We Need To Talk is done. I’ll still promote and coach, but what else? Considering: Writing a couple more horror stories Working on a sculpture project with resin (and skulls, probably) Relaxing and doing nothing, which I seem incapable of doing While in the course of doing some research, I came to a realization about oneself: if another person demands a change to your life or self in order to gain their acceptance, they have already decided to not accept you.