Holly was a good dog. She loved belly rubs, hikes with her people, and didn’t care a bit if it was raining. She always remembered me when I came to visit, even that one time we didn’t see each other for like a couple years. Holly still knew that I was good for maybe one more pet. A friend to everyone, even the deer she like to bark at in her people’s back yard.
I don’t normally do this kind of post, but normally, to process grief, I can be around people. So here we are.
Yeah, regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow. Or next week, probably.
Posted on 2020-04-17T08:48:38Z GMT
So I did some work on the design of the site; I’m still not like 100% on it, but I think it’s a lot better now than it was before. Text way to the right but also left-justified is a look, but we’ll see how I feel about it tomorrow.
There is something really nice about getting on the road. Even though I don’t have the endurance for driving that I once did; there was a time when I could get in the car and drive for 20 hours, easy. Now, I’m doing good to get 6 in a day. This day, to start, we had to detour through Lawton, to get Sophia’s keys, which she’d left in the car of a friend the night before, and subsequently he’d gone home to Lawton. All in all, it really only lost us like an hour, so 9 hours that day instead of 8.
Posted on 2020-04-16T06:48:27Z GMT
yeah, just like the title says. Putting the pictures first in the post, as a stopgap to putting them first in the design. Going to start playing around with sizes and arrangements pretty soon. Need a Visual Heirarchy, some differentiation between text types and sizes, some good colors, etc. Good does not have to be a thousand line CSS file. I’m hoping for like a hundred? Anyway, not a lot to say today. Trouble sleeping the last few nights, already took a melatonin to try to knock myself out.
I might do some truly egregious things here before the design settles. Accents. Background colors. Who knows?
(the photos: taken one of the nights in OKC. Good crowd. Nice of the clouds to put on a show as I was driving in).
Posted on 2020-04-15T06:33:52Z GMT
This was a long time ago, seems like, and far away, but it did happen, and hopefully not the last time. The first photo is all of the ‘outlaws’: those who married into this particular family gathering, including myself. I will note, now, that I’ve had a tab open with Robin’s newsletter. In my head, I keep coming back to two passages:
Toil in the shadow of calamity WILL have its day.
and
There’s a kind of grit required to get through creative failure, whether that’s commercial rejection or just your own frustration with yourself; you might be acquainted with it. This crisis demands another, deeper kind of grit, because this crisis whispers in your ear:
Even if you succeed, it won’t matter. That thing you do, it is not life and death, and everything now is life or death, one or the other, with nothing in between. Your pampered preoccupation is utterly trivial. It took a pandemic to make you see it, but it’s been true all along.
That little snake voice, the one that says “You don’t matter, your feeble attempts at art making mean nothing, they’re bad anyway,” is an emotion I know all too well. You don’t toil at a thing in relative obscurity for as long as I have without having those thoughts. It’s really part of why I can be so shy when I’m out with the camera; it’s easy to think that what I’m doing doesn’t matter and I shouldn’t bother people with it.
The workshop I went to last October had one of the questions aimed at this, sort of. The last day, the fifth question was: If today was your last 24 hours on earth, you’re leaving on a space capsule, and you only get to take with you the pictures you take now, what do you take? Now after we’d done the exercises, we were talking about the uses of the questions, and I asked, “How often are you doing ‘last 24’?” Sara, the instructor, said without hesitation,“All the time.”
And if you think about it, it kinda makes sense: all the time, it could be your last 24 hours to make art, to look and see, and be in the world. So to be thinking, is what I’m doing important enough to take with me? If it is, then dammit, there’s room for me to be here making it. Somewhere, probably instagram, I saw a poem that included the line “You are allowed to occupy space,” and that’s maybe something I didn’t always feel entitled to? It’s true, though: even though the world doesn’t always want to give it to you, it’s OK to be here and do your thing.
So, remember your Baldwin (emphasis mine):
For nothing is fixed,
forever, forever, forever,
it is not fixed;
the earth is always shifting,
the light is always changing,
the sea does not cease to grind down rock.
Generations do not cease to be born,
and we are responsible to them
because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails,
lovers cling to each other,
and children cling to us.
The moment we cease to hold each other,
the moment we break faith with one another,
the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
Posted on 2020-04-13T09:30:56Z GMT
Our first stop on the road trip was Sophia’s Dad’s house in Santa Fe, or rather, a little bit outside of town? We were completely exhausted, but managed to make it there in one piece, and then in the morning, we had just one of the best meals you can have anywhere: a breakfast burrito from The Pantry, in Santa Fe. Alice, a friend of Sohpie’s from elementary school, joined us, and we had an interesting discussion about the mediated realities we see online. Maybe you had to be there.
{insert cliche here about feeding bodies, feeding minds that I don’t have the energy for because it’s 2am}
Meow Wolf is an art installation, but it’s also a story told as a house and a music venue and tourist trap? and also really weird. Just bananas. If the gift shop stocked more XL stuff, I’d have at least one new hoodie, and probably a t-shirt, but oh well. If you get a chance, go. It’s worth an afternoon to get the experience. I’m actually also looking forward to revisiting to check out all the detail, which I’ll be doing next time I pass through. Just lavish amounts of attention paid to story and character of all these objects and rooms.
After Santa Fe, we got a good night’s sleep (which we needed, still really tired from the 18 hour day on the road the day before) and had a milk run getting into OKC the following evening.
not to bore you with technical details, but I’m putting this here so I can remember as much as anything else: Why am I wrapping all the images in headline (H1) tags?
funny story: Markdown, which is sort of a shorthand-HTML language, has what we in the business call “significant line breaks,” which means that when you press the enter key, it does stuff. It also makes assumptions about block elements versus inline elements that aren’t, like, 100% true, but that play into this. The long and the short of it is that if you have image tags all by their lonesome, Markdown assumes they need to be part of a block element, and wraps them in a <p> tag.
Now, this would be fine if I wanted my paragraphs and my pictures to have the same style, but I do not. Paragraphs should be narrow for readability, and pictures should be big, for the same reasons (also cf. Shelah Wilson, one of my college profs, “More is More”). So, a workaround that took me years to figure out, that you can have for free: wrap your images in H1 tags, like so: # [alt text](image url here). Headlines are block elements. H1 is one I almost never use, and I can avoid it and scale H2, H3, etc to fit my needs. So I’ll probably never style it.
So there: today’s tip in working around the limitations of Markdown.
Posted on 2020-04-10T09:10:40Z GMT
