~ersatzblog

Using Makefiles for Stuff aroung the Home (dir)

2026-05-08T00:00:00Z

I use a Makefile to move my emacs configuration from its git repo in my home directory to the emacs config directory. There are a variety of better ways a person could move files from one place to another and a Makefile probably wouldn't be the wisest first choice. Writing a script to execute a copy command would be very straightforward and absolutely be a more sane choice.

I wanted to learn a little more about the tool and this seemed like a fun way to waste some time doing it. I did waste a lot of time doing it, but I learned a lot about the tool. I learned enough to make use of it in more useful circumstances. So it wasn't a total wash.

I will say this for using a Makefile instead of a script: it is weirdly satisfying only seeing the files you've modified get deployed to where they need to go. I thought it might be fun to go through how that works in the context of my emacs Makefile.

After this experiment I ended up adopted Makefiles for several things including ersatz.website. It is surprisingly useful and fairly quick to write once you know what you're doing.

Emacs Makefile: how it works

The Makefile I use for my emacs stuff isn't perfect by any means but it works pretty good. You can view my Makefile in its entirity on sourcehut here.

The most important part is the phony all target:

.PHONY: all
all: $(ELISP_OUT_DIR) \
	$(INIT_ELISP_OUT_DIR) \
	$(SNIPPETS_OUT_DIR) \
	$(ELISP:./%.el=$(ELISP_OUT_DIR)/%.el) \
	$(INIT_ELISP:./%.el=$(INIT_ELISP_OUT_DIR)/%.el) \
	$(SNIPPETS:./snippets/%=$(SNIPPETS_OUT_DIR)/%)

The all target does a couple important things:

It creates all the required directories if they don't already exist.
It sets up the pattern rules that Make will use to translate input files to output files.

These pattern rules are defined where they are needed: as dependencies to the all rule. When running the all target - the default target because it is the first target defined in the file - Make will also evaluate the target's dependencies. It will effectively do a topological sort of your targets and their dependencies to figure out what the required order of operations is.

The pattern rules are the real core of Make. They are what really drive the automated incremental builds based on file modified timestamps. We can look at my elisp pattern rule to see how this works. In the above snippet, $(ELISP:./%.el=$(ELISP_OUT_DIR)/%.el) tells Make that files in the pattern ./%.el should be translated to $(ELISP_OUT_DIR)/%.el.

You will notice that the input and output patterns share what is called a "stem" represented by the %. It represents a non-empty string. The stem in the input and output rules need to match.

You can use these rules when defining your Make targets. In the below snippet I am using the output pattern for my elisp files as the target, and the input pattern as the dependency for that target.

$(ELISP_OUT_DIR)/%.el: ./%.el
	install $< $@

We told Make that we need to execute this target in the definition of our pattern in the all target. The body if the target simply runs the install command using two automatic variables.

$< refers to the first item in the list of dependencies for the current target: lets say a file called some-elisp.el that matches the input pattern we defined
$@ refers to the expanded target. In our case here with some-elisp.el, it will expand to ~/.config/emacs/some-elisp.el.

With all that set up in the Makefile, I can just type make in the terminal, and make will figure out what %.el files changed by comparing the timestamps of the input and output files and then execute the rule for any inputs that are newer.

Whew. Was it worth doing?

I learned how to use some basic Makefile techniques, and it was kind of fun to figure it all out. This is an extremely straightforward Makefile, and I am guessing it could be made even simpler with some smarter pattern or rule definitions. I am not a Make expert, and there is a lot about it I am sure I don't know. It really feels like I was learning some kind of long lost sorcery trying to implement my file.

I was able to leverage a lot of this in the Makefile I use for this website. I build the index.html page separately from the 11ty blog. The index.html page also has its own dependencies! There is a clojurescript compilation step for the generative art on the index.html page that will only be recompiled if the relevant clojurescript stuff changes. It is really nice to not have to recompile that stuff or regenerate the whole blog if I only want to update some styles in my index.html. That's why learning Make is really useful.

I started learning Go recently and was really surprised to discover that a lot of folks writing Go code actually use Makefiles to build their binaries as well!

If you know how I can improve on the Makefile I use for my emacs configuration, you should get in touch with me and tell me how to make it better!

Spring Cleaning

2026-05-06T00:00:00Z

May really crept up on me this year. I'm always surprised when the seasons change. The beginning of a season has me makes feeling like it will last the whole year. They always seem to change faster than I'm ready for. It's May now, and summer is coming on quick.

I'm doing a little digital "spring cleaning" before the summer. I retired my thinkpad, got a macbook neo, learning a few new tricks, and doing some organizing.

The death of a Thinkpad

I bought a new computer recently. I tried to put off doing it for a long time hoping that component prices would come down. They didn't. It doesn't seem like they will for a long while. The AI trends of today are making things tough for all of us. Even with the high prices, I was forced to cave and buy a new one.

My daily driver for quite a long time now has been an old Thinkpad. Not too old, but old enough to have issues. If you took a cross section, you might be able to tell exactly how old it was by counting the layers of stickers on the lid. It wasn't the most powerful or flashy thing available when I bought it, but it worked. I used it. I managed.

It developed a chronic issue of turning itself off when the battery percentage indicator was at 65% or so, and it didn't take very long to get there.

In our planned obsoleceance tinged techno world, my laptop could reasonably be considered to be "old" (as shit) or "busted" (as hell). Actually, that is probably a fair assessment. I replaced the battery in it twice trying to fix the thing, but the issue came back after the first replacement, and again after the second. I would guess that the motherboard might be the problem and could somehow be damaging the battery. I'm not really a hardware person though, and that sort of thing is a little beyond my patience level if not my knowledge level. I'm just a simpleton who needs a reliable computer. Swapping a thinkpad battery is about as far as I'm willing to go and I probably would have kept using the thing had that worked.

I decided to replace it with a citrus Macbook Neo. It is an amazing color, and just very fun. I like the color so much that I don't want to put any stickers on it. I'm loving the neo so far. It has a lot of good things going for it: battery life, weight, form factor, nice build, and looks. It also has decent speakers (very unlike my Thinkpad), a nice screen, and keyboard. I spent a little more money on upgraded storage, and a fingerprint reader. Apple bundled those two things together. So far it is a snappy little machine and it suits my purposes wonderfully. It's really great at its price point.

It is Springtime right now, and having a new computer on a fresh OSX install without several years of files strewn all over the place just feels nice. Not having to thrash around trying to find a charge cable before my Thinkpad turns itself off is also pretty nice too.

(Digital) Spring Cleaning

Setting up a new computer is always a bit of a chore. I don't like to obsessively manage my user configurations or installed programs. I think that sort of thing should be largely fluid. Use what you need and jettison everything else. Keep it light. That's a wonderful idea, but you still need a few things on your computer, don't you.

As much as I can on the new computer I am trying to track my configurations in version control separately from one another. I don't want a huge dotfiles repo, I just want to be able to undo configuration mistakes easily and track why certain changes were made, or why I made a command alias to do whatever it does.

Some (digital) highlights:

I decided to do things a little differently and adopt nushell as a daily driver. I think it has a lot of really great ideas and makes using the command line significantly more intuitive.
I'm all-in on using Jujutsu over git in my personal projects now. I wrote a post recently about Jujutsu, and how interesting I think it is. I am also trying to learn JJUI, which is a TUI program that will let me work with a JJ repo in a similar way to how magit lets you work with a git repo.
Now that I've got a macbook in my hands again I can sync my calendar across devices. That's been a very nice perk of going back to an apple computer.
I'm making a real actual effort to get rid of the rat's nest of cables I've collected over the last decade-plus. There are a lot of them. I'm organizing the most-needed ones in a little plastic box with movable dividers grouped by connector. Everything is getting a velcro loop! Anything I don't recognize the use of is getting tossed.
I am no longer managing a TODO list digitally. I messed around with that quite a bit the last several years and always ended up faffing around with the configuration of org-mode more than actually using it. A tale as old as org mode.
I'm leaning less on emacs for programming. This has been another large time sink. I've struggled a lot to get LSP stuff working for whatever language I want to do things in and I've decided it is largely not worth the headache for me right now. As much as I love emacs, I like actually doing the thing I set out to do when I opened it much more than I like trying to figure out why my python LSP is crash looping.
Speaking of programming. I'm learning the Go programming language. I use python for scripting, but it would be nice to pick up a compiled language.
I am writing documentation for myself, and updating old documentation. It is nice to come back to an old project and have a README full of why. It is amazing how much you can forget about a project you worked on even as little as a month later.

In the spirit of "spring cleaning" a future nice to have would be a more sophisticated backup solution for my digital stuff. I use a hodgepodge of things at the moment, and none of it is really automated. I've got an external drive with a copy of all my ripped CDs, several sourcehut repos making up the things I am working on that I want to keep around, and cloud storage for whatever other miscellaneous files that I want to keep around. Very likely a bunch of TTRPG pdfs, and a lot of pictures of my dog. It's slapdash at best. It works, sure, but I can do better.

I'd like to get some kind of automated backup going for some true "cold storage". Maybe I'll give rsync.net a try.

(Actual) Spring Cleaning

Outside of the literal computer I'm tidying up some other things in my physical space, and trying to take care of some long-needed projects around the house. My gf moved in, and we're learning to cohabitate. I think it is going well, but we're still adjusting! It takes time. I had to get rid of a lot of furniture to make room for another person, and there is still even more to get rid of, and even more to put into storage. I think I'll feel much lighter once we get all the furniture swapping sorted out.

The kitchen cabinets got re-arranged. Now that there are two people living here we acutally had to get a free standing pantry for the extra storage. We moved almost everything around. I'm still opening the wrong cabinets looking for things in their old places.

The dog got a bath the other day, and they spritzed him with some kind of strawberry smelling something. He's super fluffy and smells great. I think he's very pleased about it too.

Anyway

This post is getting huge, so I'll leave it here. I am excited for the summer. It is hard to gain any kind of momentum these days with the world being the way it is. I am trying to celebrate whatever little wins I can. Hopefully you are doing the same.

April Distractions

2026-04-29T00:00:00Z

This is a log of some of the distractions that sidetracked me while using the computer this month. I got the idea for a log of distractions from a list of writing prompts from The Paris Review. This is NOT an exhaustive list. I'm profoundly distractible, and probably forgot to add things to the log more than I remembered. I might continue this though, it was oddly a fun time.

Learning jujuitsu version control [2026-04-05 Sun]

I was reading this article about jujuitsu and how bookmarks are similar to git branches. The article mentioned a jj alias that some folks use to manage the issue of updating a tracked bookmark to the latest hash colloquillay known as `jj tug`.

I immediately opened a tab and started looking for it before I finished the article.

How many keystrokes before EOL? [2026-04-05 Sun]

I was in the middle of writing a blog post and started thinking about how my laptop is starting to near the end of its life and how much typing I must have done on it over the years. I started to look up if Linux had any sort of mechanism to report on keystrokes over the lifetime of an intstall.

I didn't have the Fedora distribution installed on this machine its entire lifetime, but I think I could extrapolate the earlier parts of its life based on my time using Fedora.

XSLT and RSS feeds [2026-04-07 Tue]

Had a discord discussion with some web nerds about RSS and the usability issues it has from the perspective of publisher as well as from the perspective of a consumer. Most of us in the chat publish an RSS feed for a blog or two and consume the feeds of many others.

One of the main concerns we all shared was that stumbling on an RSS feed sort of sucks if you don't know about RSS. An XML file will just be displayed in your browser in a source view by default leaving people no doubt confused about what they are supposed to do next or worse thinking they did something wrong.

We started discussing the use of XSLT to transform the feed XML into a styled HTML view if the feed XML is fetched via the browser. This is a really cool technology and extremely useful for this specific circumstance: where one needs to create a human-readable version of a machine-readable format. In the middle of the discussion we all discovered that Google was pushing for the removal of XSLT transformation support from chrome as well as the HTML standard.

In a fit of distraction I read the entire issue thread from the WHATWG on its possible removal, and got myself very mad at the same time.

Philosophical Zombies [2026-04-11 Sat]

I was reading "The Future of Everything is Lies, I guess" at aphyr.com which is a fantastic series of posts about AI, LLMs, their current effects on us and how we work, and more importantly about the possible futures that their effects could contribute to.

One of the articles mentioned the notion of "philosophical zombies" - with a hyperlink somewhere - and that was too enticing not to click on and try to read about.

I tried a few times to describe what exactly a philosophical zombie is, but I don't understand the concept myself. They are a tool of philosophical argument exploring the nature of consciousness. A zombie is just like a regular person where they percieve everything we do, but they do not [feel]{.underline} it. They can react to pain, but they do not feel the pain.

Reading the wikipedia article just left me very confused. I find this kind of philosophy very difficult to follow. I gave up and went back to the aphyr.com article.

NATO Alphabet [2026-04-14 Tue]

I was reading a comment thread on some website and overheard a phone conversation my gf was having in a different room where they were trying to read out a confirmation number to someone on the phone while trying to identify the trickier letters with a word. "'I' as in 'Iceberg'" for instance.

I stopped what I was doing and looked up the NATO Alphabet on wikipedia.

HTTP 433 Foreboding [2026-04-17 Fri]

Made a joke that they (the people in charge of such things) should create an HTTP status code for "foreboding". The server you are contacting is experiencing bad vibes at the moment; try again later.

I spent a little time looking up what an actual HTTP status code looked like and decided just how committed to the joke I actually was: not enough to actually write a joke RFC in the spirit of the infamous Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.

Rain Bombs [2026-04-20 Mon]

I was doing a creative writing project for myself and was trying to think of ways to describe clouds that really captured the sublime nature of a cloud against a landscape. I was really struggling and got completely and utterly distracted watching a PBS Nova documentary I came across when reading about thunderheads. It was a documentary about a phenomenon called "rain bombs" where a very powerful storm releases a torrential amount of rain in a highly localized area.

It was pretty interesting. You can find the "rain bomb" documentary here.

Saturation Diving [2026-04-23 Thu]

I am doing a play through of a solo TTRPG adventure called Thousand Empty Light based on the Mothership 1e system. The story of the adventure has the player character travelling underwater to work inside an underwater structure something like 100 meters down. I had heard of saturation diving where divers that have to work at extreme depths will basically live in pressurized conditions while doing a multiple week long dive shift so they don't have to continually undergo compression and decompression.

I wanted to figure out if the depth of the underwater structure would mean the player character would have to be "pressurized". Reading the wikipedia article on Saturation Diving, and it appears that yes that could be a possibility. I could ignore this aspect of the adventure but it might make things more interesting narratively.

I plan to publish a play through on my blog so making the narrative more interesting with additional hazards like compression/compression/saturation could be fun.

1979 Alien Graphic Design [2026-04-27 Mon]

I am playing through Thousand Empty Light - a solo TTRPG based on Mothership 1e - and the game supplies its own symbol language inspired by the 1979 movie Alien. I think this is extra as hell and I love it.

I took a break from the game and got thoroughly distracted reading this article from Typeset The Future on the typography used in the movie Alien. They take a look at the symbol language for the movie developed by Ron Cobb they called "Semiotic Standard For All Commercial Trans-Stellar Utility Lifter And Heavy Element Transport Spacecraft". Cool.

If you're an Alien fan at all, definitely check out that Typeset the Future article. It is a really fantastic deep dive into all the design that went into the movie.

What was I doing again?

La Luna

2026-04-08T00:00:00Z

I am sitting on my wooden fire-escape deck in 2017 looking East watching the sunset shine againt some distant clouds. I am on the third floor of an aging walk up in a neighborhood full of two-flats and single family homes. It is summertime. I feel a warm breeze across my body. I watch the neighbor's maple tree while it sways with the same wind I am feeling. I hear the sound the tree makes as the wind ripples through it. It sounds like a wave breaking against a beach. The neighborhood birds are singing their last songs before the dim of night quiets them. I can hear the distant hum of the nearby expressway behind the noise of rippling leaves and branches. An icecube in my drink cracks.

I look to my right - South now - across the roof of my neighbor's house to watch the other neighborhood trees. There is something on their roof. I can see its silhouette against the swaying trees further down the block. There is a cat on the roof. I recognize the cat. It is my downstairs neighbor's cat Luna. How did she get over there? She must have jumped from the second floor of the deck across the gangway and onto the rooftop.

My downstairs neighbor's screen door opens. I see light through the deck boards beneath me. A woman speaks Spanish. I hear the cat's name being called. I watch the cat stand up and casually walk down the sloping roof to the eave and make a leap towards home.

View from the third floor deck of a Chicago walk up looking East across an alleyway during a sunset. In the foreground is part of the building the photo is being taken. Midground has the alleyway, alley-facing garages, and the houses on the other side of the block. In the distance are clouds blazing orange with the light from the setting sun.

∗

I've been thinking a lot about my old apartment lately. It wasn't a perfect place. It had a lot of old building problems, and a similar amount of bad landlord problems. But it did have a fire-escape deck (a Chicago staple) with a view. I think that is why I stayed there for so long. I stayed there for ten years. I could watch the sunrise if I bothered to get up early enough. In the evening I'd sometimes catch a view like the one in the picture above. If the evening or the night was clear enough I could see the moon for a while before it swung out of view. It was real nice to look at.

It's funny how memory works though isn't it? You can live an experience of looking out off a deck at the sunset over and over for years and they still get filed away in your memory away from your immediate concerns until something jostles you into recalling them. Each time this happens you rember things a little differently than before. This time I remembered when I saw the downstairs neighbor's cat on the roof next door. Luna is Spanish for moon.

While I write this there are four astronauts flying throuh space at almost 1800 mph on their way back to earth after taking a trip around the dark side of the moon. Maybe that is what jostled the memories of my old apartment loose. The astronauts are members of the Artemis II mission. This is the first NASA moon mission I've seen in my lifetime and naturally I've been following coverage of the mission as the crew gets through the major mission stages. Recently they lost contact with earth for something like 40 minutes while their ship went around the dark side of the moon. I can only imagine what that felt like. They have taken some incredible photos during their trip. This one is what they call an "earthset" - taken before the earth drops out of view as the spacecraft does its flyby. NASA has a page with a lot more images from the mission here.

It's been an amazing thing to watch.

The astronauts are supposed to splash down this Friday on April 10th. I'll be watching.

Learning Jujutsu

2026-04-06T00:00:00Z

I am not learning to fight. I am learning the Jujutsu version control system! I've used git almost my entire programming career, and I've learned to use it well^[1]. Over the years I've acquired the ability to do rebase workflows, stacked branches, fixups, reordering, staging changes using git add -p, and many other things. I've got a whole mess of git command aliases I'm hoarding like some kind of Tolkien dragon. I've learned the magic spells but still aren't a master of them. Even armed with this secret arcane knowledge, git is still a very confounding and difficult tool to use.

JJ - the abbreviated name of Jujutsu - immediately solves many of the problems I encounter when using git. JJ has a markedly different set of ideas compared to git. Unfrtunately that means my git knowledge doesn't fully transfer, but I think that is alright. JJ actually makes a lot of that knowledge no longer needed. It is a much simpler tool to use and understand and I think that is really exciting.

Matty Note: This isn't intended to be a technical inventory of either of these tools, just some off the cuff remarks about using them. There are probably better examples of pain points - or even better ways of doing the things mentioned that make them less of a pain! These are just the things I am familiar with.

Sharp Edges of Git

Many git users actually use a "front end" that makes interacting with git easier. Some folks use plugins provided by their Interactive Development Environment (IDE for short) to make their git workflows easier to handle and more visual. IDEs usually also integrate essential tooling for conflict resolution, and diff/history viewing. These tools are indespensible. I've been a user of the magit git porcelain inside of emacs for several years. While I use an IDE like VSCode for most of my work, I've installed emacs on all the work machines I've touched just to have access to it.

Git is an amazing tool, but everyone except the most powerful wizards seem to need a little help getting the most out of it. I think most of the issue with git is that there are several different commands you need to master to do common operations and some of them you need to do in concert with each other.

For example, when doing a rebase to replay commits on top of some branch, you may run into conflicts that require resolutions immediately. These resolutions then need to be staged with git add. After staging the conflict resolutions you will need to continue rebasing your commits by saying git rebase --continue. You have to be careful not to actually commit the staged changes during a rebase! This is wildly confusing. Normally when you add you commit your changes. Not when doing a rebase!

Interwoven incantations are also required when doing what should be simple things like fixing a previous commit. This is important to do if you don't want your git log to look like a truck drove through it. You can "fixup" a previous commit a few ways but one method is to do a "fixup" commit. You can make changes, stage them with git add, commit them as a fixup commit with git commit --fixup <revision>. Now you'll have a fixup commit in your git log. You'll want to merge the fixup commit with the <revision> you mentioned in the commit command. You can do this with the convenient git rebase -i <revision> --autosquash. Now we both have a headache.

Notable differences in JJ

JJ streamlines a lot of this kind of stuff. I won't outline all the differences here, but I'll try to pick out a few things I am impressed with.

One surprising and exciting change is that JJ doesn't have the notion of a staging area! Every change you make is automatically committed to something called "the working copy" aliased to @. The staging area in git is the source of a lot of friction when developing. If you're working on a feature branch but need to jump back to the main branch to fix an issue you will need to either stash or commit your partial changes before switching to main and getting to work. In JJ, because everything in the working copy is already automatically committed, you can say jj new <revision> to create a new commit with <revision> as the parent.

Fixing prior commits with changes in your working copy is as easy as running jj squash --into <revision>. Child commits of <revision> will automatically recieve the changes that are being squashed. This can cause conflicts, but the conflicts don't have to be immediately resolved like they do it in git. If a conflict happens at <revision> that commit and all its children are marked as conflict commits. They can still be edited and worked on as normal until you're ready to act on the conflict. To resolve a conflict, you'd just insert a commit after the conflict commit using jj new <revision>, resolve the conflict, then squash the two together with jj squash. The primitive actions in JJ are often used together in this way to perform more complex actions, In git, they might require multiple different commands like add, commit, rebase that would require multiple different flags

JJ also has a notion of an "immutable" commit. From JJ's perspective, any commit that is tracked in some remote branch is considered "immutable" by default. JJ will stop you from running any commands that would be destructive to immutable commits. With git, you can destroy as much history as you want in your local repo with rebasing. This can be really tough to deal with when you have to reckon with changes coming at you from upstream.

JJ is unique in that all the changes to your repo are also tracked. This enables us to undo actions! If you mess something up you can just jj undo and go back to your previous state. I cannot tell you, precious reader, how many times I wished I had that ability in git after running some git command that I thought I understood. Often with git I'd actually create a backup branch from the current branch so I could try out a few commands and know I could return to the safety of the first branch. That's not good!

There are many other little quality of life features that JJ has in addition to the ones mentioned above. The default log command I find to be much more useful than git's. JJ also provides different conflict markers than git which I find to be more useful and clear. These little things all add up to make a better experience. Check out some user testamonials and consider trying it out yourself!

JJ Resources

I am curently all-in with experimenting using Jujutsu as a git replacement. So far, I am having a great time. I really think JJ has the juice.

Some resources I've been looking at to learn JJ are listed below:

Most git users would say that they have learned enough git commands to be "dangerous" - a lot of git operations are destructive and can rewrite the change history causing lots of problems. ↩︎

Audio Bookin'

2026-03-22T00:00:00Z

The routine of my life is - at its best - scattered. It’s difficult to find uninterrupted time to read a book. This is a self inflicted problem to some extent: I don’t make it a priority to read before bed like I am sure adult readers my age likely do. Lately I am prioritizing watching old Star Trek episodes (currently Deep Space Nine) as a way to unwind from the day instead of reading. I’m pretty worn out at night and find it remarkably less work to sit down and watch TV than it is to pick up a book. I’m sure this is a wildly shared feeling among adults of a certain age. We’re worn down and busy.

I miss reading though! I used to read on the L during my work commute, but I haven’t had a consistent commute since COVID when they sent us all home. Reading on the train was a nice way to decompress. I regained time for myself by not having to commute but I spend that time on care tasks around the house and managing the dog all day. I’m still worn down and busy!

I started experimenting with audiobooks as a way to get reading done while I’m doing other things. I can put on noise cancelling headphones and listen to a book while I vacuum the house, clean the bathroom, do my dishes, do laundry, and cook. I can take a book with me while I take the dog out several times a day instead of walking him around the block while the 30 minutes that activity takes evaporates into thin air. Having an audio book going while doing mundane chores has the added benefit of making them much more tolerable.

Audiobooks do have a few downsides, sure. It can be easy to get distracted while you’re listening and miss narration and find yourself lost when you regain your focus. I can do some things while I’m listening to a book but I can’t do everything. Audiobooks can also be tough to enjoy if you don’t like how the narrator is doing things. I’ve rented audiobooks from the library and immediately returned them because I knew I’d have a hard time with the narration. That’s alright. The point of the audio books is to make reading easier for myself.

There are people who don’t count audiobooks as reading - but I don’t believe that is an argument worth entertaining. I feel that an audiobook has me equally engaged as I am when I read a physical book. End of story.

I have an overgrown forest of physical book stacks that I’m hoping to return to soon. For the moment however, audiobooks are the force that is getting me interested in reading again. While I work on reestablishing my life’s routine, listening to a book is just fine.

Some audiobooks that I’ve especially enjoyed listening to are:

Dune by Frank Herbert from Macmillan Audio
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas from Naxos Audiobooks
IQ84 by Haruki Murakami from Audible Studios*

Today I am 36

2025-10-13T00:00:00Z

Today I am 36!

Went up to Wisconsin to enjoy fall a little more than is possible here in Chicago. It was really nice seeing the stars.

Here is some evidence of life being lived. This is a video of a crackling fire in a fire pit with logs arranged in a "log cabin" style. Some woodland sounds can be heard in the background.

Generative art for ersatz.website

2025-09-25T00:00:00Z

I've recently updated the splash page of ersatz.website after I read a blog post by Amy Goodchild called "Early Computer Art In The 50's and 60's". In the article, Goodchild catalogues some early uses of the computer as an artistic medium. I found this post inspiring and fascinating because clarified for me the core idea of generative art: emergence.

Wikipedia describes emergence as a phenomena that "occurs when a complex entity has properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own, and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole".

I'm mostly familiar with the idea of "emergent behavior" in the context of video games - where new forms of play can occur within a game because the game's systems are robust enough to be combined in unforseen ways. A great example of a relatively recent game with a lot of emergent gameplay was Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch. The physics in the game combined with the combat abilities in the game led to some very cool and unexpected combinations. One of my favorites was this innovative way players came up with to get around the game world called a stasis launch. See here also.

In generative computer art, emergent behavior occurs when a myriad of simple rules and algorithms a programmer and artist uses when running a generative art program or simulation come together and create something unexpected. Amy Goodchild has written about this phenomenon as well. There is a real sense of fun that comes from the unexpected results of the confluence of mundane algorithms. That is what interests me about generative art: that something unexpected and pretty can come from something so antithetical to itself: a computer program.

The generative art that I did for the splash page of ersatz.website after reading Goodchild's article was partly inspired by idea of "emergence" that the article outlines. The specific idea of recursive squares skewed, colored, and layered on top of each other came directly from the the book Beautiful Racket. I found the cover very striking when I first saw the design several years ago, and wanted to try to make my own iteration. The Beautiful Racket cover appears to be based on an art series by Vera Molnar called (Des)Ordres (1974) that Goodchild featured in the article on early computer art as well.

I'm really pleased with how it looks. It was written in clojurescript and rendered through HTML canvas. The squares are generated in a new way every time the page is visited.

I'll publish the code in a future article once I tidy it up.

Emacs config

2025-09-21T00:00:00Z

I've been a long time user of the GNU Emacs text editor.

It truly is impressive what some people are able to accomplish in Emacs. I am a programmer, so I use it to write code. CIDER - an Emacs major mode used for writing clojure code - is one example of some of this very impressive work that I use regularly. Other people might use something like org-mode to manage their calendar, to-do list, and even create an entire Zettelkasten system for themselves. It is wild what you can do in Emacs. It is flexible enough to be a full on integrated development environment with something like CIDER while simultaneously being a true hypertext experience with something like org-mode and org-mode.

If you are just an average user like me and aren't writing major or minor modes for Emacs, or doing the whole Zettelkasten thing, you're probably still writing confiuration files to tell Emacs how to use libraries people have written. With the ability to configure your experience so heavly, users naturally do so. It can be very overwhelming to a new user, and it was for me for a long time. A lot of users of Emacs will share their configurations online and exchange notes on how to do things they want to do or how to mold the editor into a workflow that better works for them.

An Emacs user's configuration usually grows over time into a difficult to maintain mess. Not always - but it happens often enough that the Emacs user community has a running joke about declaring "bankruptcy" and starting their configuration over from scratch once it gets too unwieldly. I've one this multiple times myself. If you've survived multiple major versions of the editor like I have, then you'll naturally have a lot of spooky cobwebs in your config that you might want to clear out. It takes a lot of care to keep a configuation lean and modular. Sometimes you just want to get things done and non faff around in configuration.

I almost had the bankruptcy impulse this last week!! Instead of declaring full on bankruptcy and starting over I decided to make an effort to clean up my configuation, throw in a README file, and just put it online.

You can find my emacs configuration here. As usual with Emacs and user-configurations: my configuration is likely not to be very useful to you unless you happen to be me. README is still getting updated.

Write yourself a README

2025-08-11T00:00:00Z

ersatz.website is a static website. Every time I make a post I need to perform a number of small steps to get that post onto the internet. When I wrote my last post about using a split keyboard I screwed up the steps and caused my entire blog to 404. The reason this happened is because I hadn't made a post in several months and just forgot how to do it.

Part of the solution to this problem is using a README file. If you aren't some flavor of software developer or some kind of sadistic computer hobbyist, you may not have ever heard of a README. Wikipedia defines a README simply as a file that "contains information about other files in a directory or archive of computer software". README files in different projects don't all contain the same information but some common things that are usually included are installation instructions, usage instructions, and things of that sort. The file is intended to be used as a quick reference for the software it is paired with.

I had a README file for my entire ersatz.website project, but it was out of date and incomplete! This is a common problem!

Because I use the Digital Ocean App Platform, I have to "deploy" my generated static site to a github repository. The App Platform watches that repo for changes and then deploys my site automatically for me. This is normally great! This repository lives as a sub-directory in the main ersatz.website repository. I have a Makefile that generates all of ersatz.website and places it into the output repository that the App Platform uses. This is slightly complicated due to having to use a separate repo to store the output of the static website generation. Normally you might have your build pipeline building the site for you, but I am limited by the App Platform on Digital Ocean to simply deploying the generated results until I can figure out how to have their application platform build pipeline to run my Makefile with all the required dependencies.

The steps I need to perform are

Committing the post to the main ersatz.website github repo
Running the Makefile to output the whole generated static site to a folder containing a git repo called www
I need to go into that www folder, and commit the new static site output (I just do a git add . and git commit --amend --no-edit)
I force push the www git repo to Github (--amend --no-edit changes history)

The App Platform then updates the deployed website.

My README file contained none of this information. The README is exactly where these steps should have been documented along with why these steps need to be performed. Six months is a long time between posts and it isn't any surprise that the deployment steps were forgotten. When I was fixing the problem I also had to re-discover why my deployment process is a little convoluted when fixing bad deployment. Normally whatever projects I work on contain a README - this one did - but it is super easy to fall behind with updating it when other things seem much more important. I think writing blog posts felt more important than documenting how the actually nitty-gritty details of the deployment process worked.

Accidentally taking my blog offline by (somehow) pushing the wrong stuff to the git repo hosted on Github that the App Platform uses was a fantastic reminder to make sure that I keep my README file up to date with any relevant information I'd like to have if I came back six months later and forgot how everything worked. I use READMEfiles written in Mardown in most of my projects, and you should too so you don't get yourself into the situaton I got into.

Like I said, a README is only part of the solution to this deployment snafu. Whenever multiple steps are required to do something critical, it is always a good idea to consider writing a script to perform all the necessary actions automatically and correctly. I had a Makefile defined to perform all the steps required to generate the site, but the deployment was still a largely manual (and annoying) process to kick off. Perfect for a little script to do for me.

I'll probably get to that later. Maybe. I am writing this post first.

Using a split keyboard

2025-08-07T00:00:00Z

I am trying to transition myself to using a split keyboard when I'm on the computer. I always thought of split keyboards as peripherals for the truly hardcore hobbyists. I'm not a hobbyist by any means, but I do have some wrist and back problems. A split keyboard seemed like something that could help with some issues I was dealing with: wrist issues from having hands super close together, as well as neck and back strain from maintaining poor posture while on the computer. I liked the idea of putting the two keyboard halves a little more than shoulder-width apart would keep my chest more "open". Combined with actually sitting at a desk with a monitor at the correct height, the position of the keyboard halves should force me into a much better posture.

I ended up purchasing the ErgoDox EZ several years ago. The ErgoDox EZ from ZSA is a commercial version of the DIY hobbyist Ergodox. I never had a mechanical keyboard before but was always curious about them. I knew a few folks that were into them and owned a few and because they seemed to enjoy them so much I decided the EZ was a good starting point. It wasn't cheap, but I figured that over the long term the thing would pay for itself. I still think it will.

One of the things that initially attracted me to the EZ from ZSA was that it was highly configurable at the firmware level. Using their web application you were able to configure every bit of the layout yourself, define several different layers, modifier keys, macros - virtually anything you could think of. Their "configurator" was a really powerful tool. You'd take the ouput of the tool and use it to flash the keyboard firmware. Kinda fun! It was also a bit overwhelming.

I ran into a few issues right away:

I couldn't find the right layout that would work well for writing code or using the Emacs text editor. I went through probably two dozen iterations taking small tweaks into the editor to try and then repeating that loop. I think eventually I got something pretty decent that works fairly well. I spent a lot of my first moments with the board going through this process and it really inhibited my ability to really just sit and use the thing.
The keyboard layout was ortholinear. This means that the keys are all in vertical alignment with each other and are not staggered. Look down at your keyboard dear reader - are your keys staggered? It was a real big adjustment. Lots of typos. This was something that I'd eventually get used to.
I wasn't the strongest touch typer to begin with. I didn't totally flunk out of Mavis Beacon's touch typing class but I wasn't the best at it either. Over the years I sort of worked out a way to type that probably wasn't exactly the best way. Changing to a split keyboard was difficult. Changing to a split keyboard with some wild customizations and layer switching and modifier key configurability was more difficult.

None of these issues individually or even all together were insurmountable. All these things I am certain I could have gotten used to if I just spent the time ... using the keyboard and getting used to them. I don't need to type at some ridiculous WPM speed, but I do want to be comfortable. I think the initial discomfort was just a bit too much and I ended up shelving the thing. It has lived in my closet for a few years I am sad to say.

My sore-ass back and neck are really forcing my hand though, so I busted the keyboard out again. The old layout I was constantly fiddling with was pretty alright and I started to use it as-is. I have to constantly consult the ZSA keyboard configuration tool to remember where I put certain things, but ... I'll get used to it eventually and soon enough won't need to do that anymore. Getting used to the thing in the context of the Emacs text editor remains the biggest challenge.

If you're curious at all about the layout I am rolling with currently, you can find it here. My goal with the layout was to sort of mirror things on both halves of the keyboard so I can do key chords in a more intuitive way: if a letter is on the left half then I will use ALT or CTRL on the right half, and if a letter in a chord is on the right half then I will use ALT or CTRL on the left half - and so on. It feels kind of like I'm playing the bongos or something like that. Fun. Most of my programming sybols are on the second layer and I get at those symbols in the same way except instead of holding ALT or CTRL I am holding the layer switch key on the opposite half. It surprisingly works pretty alright. Took a lot of just trying things out and finally just deciding to really lean into the split keyboard dynamic. A lot of things in my layout I just delayed on dealing with until I figure out what I want to do. For example the thumb clusters on layer-2 are nonsense. A couple keys on layer-1 aren't even mapped. That's fine! I'll come back to those things once I really get the hang of things.

Keep your fingers crossed for my sore-ass neck in the meantime!

Hello from the Midwest

2025-01-21T00:00:00Z

It is -5° Fahrenheit outside in Chicago right now. Reading the weather from bed this morning I saw the weather app blurt out that it "feels like" -25° (-31.6° Celsius for any of you Celsius perverts out there). That's cold. That's so cold that I am unsure of what adjectives are even available to properly describe it. "Dangerous" is one that comes to mind - so is "uncomfortable". As a good citizen of the Midwestern United States, I've got a proper jacket for this kind of weather along with base layers, neck wear, footwear, hats, and gloves. This is the winter gear I spend all season hoping I never need to use very much. It doesn't get this variety of "cold" too often, but the heavy duty winter clothes are crucial to have if you're spending any time outside in "feels like" -25° kinds of conditions.

My dog Donut is part Husky and really enjoys the cold. He watches me read the weather from bed every morning while he patiently waits (sometimes impatiently) for me to get moving. On days like today, it's tough to get out of bed. I'm thinking about all the layers I have to put on before I can take the dog around the block and feel heavy and tired. I know I'll be doing it several more times during the day. It won't be getting any warmer for a day or so, and it won't be easy, but at least the sun is shining.

In a little while I'll go work up the nerve to see if I can get the car to start. I need to run it a little bit so things don't freeze. For now though, I'm warm inside.

Selfie of a mustached man looking into the camera wearing a large parka with a faux fur hood. A hooded sweatshirt is visible under the turned up hood of the jacket. He is wearing a neck gaiter, and an orange winter had on underneath the hood. A slight smile visible.

Reflecting on David Lynch

2025-01-17T00:00:00Z

David Lynch has died today. That feels like such a strange sentence to write. It is unreal to read. David Lynch has been such a constant presence in my mind, and such a large influence on how I view and experience art and film that it is difficult to accept the fact he is no longer with us. Both his films and his work on Twin Peaks are things that I'll appreciate for the rest of my life.

Screen grab from David Lynch's Dune. A Mid closeup shot of David Lynch's cameo appearance as the captain of a Spice Crawler. He is lit in half light and half shadow speaking into a microphone. Goggles on his head.

He lived the "art life" fully and with his whole self. He was a true American original, and god damn he was funny. I am confident there will never be another David Lynch.

Another New Year's Eve

2024-12-31T00:00:00Z

Today is the final day of an arduous year. I'm looking forward to a fresh one. For a lot of 2024 I was in survival mode and living every day in a very reactive way and without much focus on the important things in my life. It's been exhausting. There were some bright spots to be sure, but looking back at my time this year I can deeply feel the imbalance between brightness and the opposite. Finally though we've all made it through to the end. Hooray!

I don't want 2025 to be so reactive. I want to have some idea of what I'd like to focus on this year.

I've outlined several things I'm resolving to prioritize in 2025. More than anything, I'm prioritizing my health and happiness this year. I'm saying that out loud a second time: I am prioritizing my health and happiness. It's alright if not everything happens, but the most important thing is that I try to get out of this reactive head space and make some choices for myself. Below is a list of some of the things I've chosen to prioritize in 2025.

Develop an art practice 🎨

"Develop an art practice" sounds very serious and stuffy. All I mean is that I'd like making art to be part of my life. It's fine if I'm bad at it! I just want to do it. I'd like to try to fill a sketchbook this year, finish my mobile project which has been stalled for a while, try collage, and also try doing some pastel or gouache.

The important thing here is that I make some space in my days so I have the option to choose art.

Write some things down 📓

I started using little Field Notes notebooks the last year or so to keep track of things that need doing. It's been nice. Sometimes I will write some things down and then not look at the notebook again for a week (I have ADHD, lmao). Mostly though, it has been great. It feels great to fill one of these things up and then file it away in a box with the other filled up notebooks. It makes me feel like I've been busy doing something, which I think is a terribly underrated feeling.

I recently started a second notebook separate from my todo list notebook where I write down some thoughts about how I am feeling when I get worked up, pissed about work, annoyed by the dog, upset about loud road noise outside, etc. This has been very helpful as a tool to help me SLOW DOWN and acknowledge my feelings. Taking some notes about how I'm feeling helps me process through them. It's great. I don't always remember I have this tool available, though. I'd like to do this more often.

Listen to music 🎶

Until I got my iPod, I didn't really listen to much music in 2024! I was mostly doing podcasts while I was driving the car or doing chores. I didn't really have any music in the background. In years past when I worked in an office, I was listening to music easily 40 hours a week. I also played music really loud while I cooked food or just hung around my apartment. For whatever reason, maybe moving house or my mood changing, I largely stopped. I'm getting back into it though, and will continue to do so in the new year.

Play some music 🎸

I play the guitar a little bit, but not very well. I never developed a song repertoire, and instead spent most of my time with the instrument just goofing around after annoying work days. I learned a couple songs that I mostly stuck to, didn't practice purposefully, and would usually end up putting it down for several months before picking it up again and doing the same thing. I never really leveled up my playing. I'd like to get back into the habit of regular practice, and also learn songs that I can play confidently. I'd also like to make a point to really learn the notes on the instrument and maybe a little music theory. Years ago I took classical lessons for a couple months and it was really satisfying to know what you were playing.

Pet a horse 🐴

It is important to set realistic goals for yourself, I'm told! Petting a horse was a new year's resolution I told someone I had several years ago as a joke. Even though it started as a joke, several years later I never did it. I think horses are really cool animals, and I'd love to meet one and feed it an apple or something else a horse likes to eat. A trail ride would be really great.

Do yoga 🪷

I'm on the computer all the time for work, and at 35 I am really starting to pay the price. Wrist pain, back aches, neck stiffness - boy howdy, I've got it all. I've been saying for years that I'd like to start doing yoga to improve mobility and also mitigate all these weird issues caused by being sedentary all day. I'd like to start doing a little bit of yoga in the morning to help wake up, but also at night before bed to help me get relaxed before sleeping. It sucks feeling discomfort all the time, all day. Hopefully yoga will be helpful.

Read before bed 📖

Like many people these days, I habitually scroll on screens before bed. It isn't good for me. It keeps me up longer than I mean to be up, and it causes a lot of unneeded eye strain. I'd rather read a book. I've tried to get into bed a little earlier than usual with the dog and sit up with a book. It's going okay. Over the last month I read a couple books in the "southern reach" trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. I am part way through the final book right now and enjoying it.

I think I would be very successful at reading before bed as long as I'm able to get into bed at a reasonable time when I'm not dead tired. Having good sleep hygiene is something I've struggled with the last year. Looking forward to getting into a book might be helpful there.

Take a trip out of town 🚆

I don't take a lot of vacations. I find the planning required to be extremely difficult and overwhelming. I'd like to practice that skill so I can enjoy traveling out of Chicago a bit this year. I don't think I left the state all of 2024.

Some places I'd like to go:

Portland, OR
Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in WI
Minneapolis, MN (taking the brand new BOREALIS Amtrak line from Chicago through Wisconsin)
Camping (somewhere in the woods, presumably - tbd where)

Enjoy a bonfire 🔥

I think the last bonfire I sat around might have been in 2022. Sitting around with your friends in front of a fire to me is one of life's greatest pleasures. I need a lot more of this in the new year.

Take some pictures 📸

I have a couple cameras stashed away in a closet. Both film cameras. I also have a fun little instax camera. I want to make some use of these in the new year! The two cameras I have are both film cameras. Film is a little bit annoying to deal with. It is expensive to send off to develop, and even more expensive if you want them to digitize it. I'm a real sucker for the shutter sounds those old cameras make though, so the price of entry may be worth it. It's kind of exciting not knowing exactly how your pictures will turn out until they're developed, too. I should post some pictures I've taken in the past sometime.

I've got a phone camera in my pocket nearly at all times, but I rarely take photos with it. I should take more photos with my phone too.

Ride my bike 🚲

Recently I wrote about how nice it felt to ride my bike when no one was around. I also talked about how little riding I did in 2024. When I got my bike the year before I rode it all over the place, almost every day. I got a little psyched out by car traffic and stopped riding. This year, I will ride more. It is good exercise, and it feels great to pedal around. Reminds me of being a kid.

That's all. Happy new year!

🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑

Blogging psuedo-anonymously

2024-12-28T00:00:00Z

I write this blog under the name 'matty' and not my full name because I want to be slightly anonymous. Running a website and especially what could be called a "personal" blog under a real name that could come up in search results would make me feel the need to put on some kind of public face. I'd feel as if I'd have to sanitize what I write, or avoid topics such as mental health. I respect folks who write online about those things with their full chest and their real names but I'm generally a pretty private person. Having a little space between my online and offline self makes me comfortable enough to not second guess what I post here. It also has the ancillary benefit of making me feel a bit more mysterious, which is pretty fun.

I tried to start a website more than once over the last decade and completely bounced off of it each time. I work in a technical field, and a lot of folks in this field run their own sites and use their blogs to build an online presence that serves their personal brand. There is a lot of cultural pressure in the field to do the same. Folks not doing this sort of personal marketing are seen as foolish or not serious. It is very weird, but I found that cultural pressure affecting enough to try and do the same thing with my own sites. It turned running a website (which should be fun!) into a chore. I felt pressured to choose technical writing relevant to my field over any kind of personal writing or goofing off that could end up associated with my real name.

Truthfully, I don't like my job or my field very much after doing it for more than a decade and limiting the scope of a personal website to the field had me lose any publishing momentum I had very quickly every time I launched a site.

I'm happy to go just by 'Matty' this time around and write about whatever I want. Having this blog be pseudo anonymous has the effect of me feeling zero pressure to maintain any kind of professional facade. I don't feel like I have to write about any kind of specific topic and only write about what I'm feeling. It's great.

Late night bike riding

2024-12-24T00:00:00Z

It's Christmas eve and I just got home after taking a late night bike ride around my neighborhood. I haven't taken the bike out much over the last year. I let myself get psyched out by the cars I was sharing the road with, started to ride less, and then hardly at all. I used to ride a lot and I was feeling a little down about how little I got out on the bike over the last year. It upset me just enough to do something about it. I decided to charge up my bike lights, pump up the tires, dust the thing off, and get out for a ride.

Being able to experience all the streets I normally ride around on without any cars was incredibly relaxing. It was so quiet that all I could hear was myself and the sounds of the bike. I wasn't constantly checking behind me, I was able to get through two way stops in the neighborhood without cars not seeing me despite wearing high-vis gear, I didn't hear any cars behind me start to floor it to get around me at high speeds on a residential street, and no one passed me close enough to nearly knock me off my bike with their side mirror as a punishment for being an inconvenience. It was just me pedaling around enjoying a bike ride without all the usual things that you have to worry about when you're on a bike and a lot of other people are in cars.

When I wasn't thinking about all that extra distracting stuff I was able to just slow down and enjoy rolling around the neighborhood. I found it to be a nice reminder of why I bought a bike in the first place.

I'll be sure to snap a photo of my winter riding getup the next time I'm out. Happy holidays!

Ambient music past bedtime

2024-12-18T00:00:00Z

As I start typing, it is eleven minutes after midnight on December the 16th. I am in bed with a computer in my lap and music in my ears. This is well past the bedtime of any reasonable person for whom Monday morning requires them being alert and awake, taking care of pets or dependents and going to work. Tonight I am not being a reasonable person. I am tired, but I am unable to sleep. My mind is racing towards the winter solstice.

I am awake listening to the late Hiroshi Yoshimura's ablum GREEN from 1986. It was reissued in 2017 by Light In The Attic Records I'm not really sure how I found it. Most likely it popped up as a YouTube recommendation during some music video diving. Electronic ambient is a genre that I've not spent significant time with. I've been enjoying Yoshimura's stuff though. I've been listening to some of his records this past week while I wind down my day, and also to mask the road noise I normally hear while walking the dog.

As someone not very accustomed to ambient music there was a bit of an adjustment period over the more relaxed and unhurried pace that this style of music has. Slowly, and with a little patience, Yoshimura's songs started to reveal their layers to me. Listening to Green makes me feel like it is summer time, and I just parked my bike next to a creek. If I close my eyes I can see the water moving.

If you're up late and not ready for Monday either, you can find Hiroshi Yoshimura's 1986 album Green on YouTube.

Added a links archive

2024-12-08T00:00:00Z

Small meta update: I create a links archive that I hope to grow into a large collection of cool and interesting web pages as well as a blogroll that indexes all the blogs I'm subscribed to. The links archive can be accessed here. I've also added a link to the main navigation here on ~mattyblog.

I hope you enjoy being an internet astronaut as much as I do, and that some of these links take you somewhere fun and interesting. As of today (December 8, 2024) the links archive is pretty sparse. More links coming soon!

Internet Adventures Vol. 1

2024-12-01T00:00:00Z

I like surfing the web. I'm sure that isn't very surprising given that I run a blog; looking around and reading other people's blogs is kind of the fun at the core of the whole thing, right? I haven't been using my feed aggregator to read much of anything because I've been tired of my subscriptions. I had set up my reader to pull in a lot of "tech blog" sort of stuff. As a haggard and burnt out tech worker myself, reading posts about tech is the last thing I want to be doing with my precious free time anymore. I cleared out all my subscriptions and started over.

The ideal scenario I'm imagining is being able to pull up my reader and just go on an adventure. I'd love to check out someone's DIY project where they renovate their garden shed, read about what someone thinks about a new video game, see someone's photos from a rad vacation, look at some cool art that someone made, or hear some music someone recorded!

I've started to really try to get out and find new things to read, and new blogs to visit. There are some wildly cool sites out there made by equally cool people. They just can be a little tricky to find. I'm spelunking through people's blogrolls, clicking links all over the place, and following my GUTS! I'm hoping to share a little bit of what I find over time with you here as a fun little series. You can join me as a fellow internet astronaut.

Below are three blogs I've added to my feed reader in the last couple days. Click the headers to visit them!

Aegir Hallmundur

Aegir's blog is really something. They are a designer and artist living in Wales. I love the design of their site. They use such beautiful typography - especially their post headings! I think that font might actually be custom made. It is so cool. They post some beautiful photography too. I'm excited to see more updates from them come through in the feed reader.

Seeing how wonderfully they've designed their site makes me want to redesign mine!

Roar of the Days

Roar of the Days is described as an "oddly strange personal blog", and I love it for that! They have a super well designed website, and share a lot of the excitement I have about running your own and making it personal. It is really cool to me that someone from Hong Kong shares a similar kind of nostalgia. Wild!

I read their review of the video game Eastward earlier today and it was fantastic. I played the game myself when it came out and it was fun to read someone else's (corect!) opinion of it. I'll be looking forward to more of their game reviews!

David Fisher, Carving Explorations

David Fisher's blog documents the process of hand carving beautiful and functional wooden bowls. It's really fascinating. I took a few woodworking classes in the recent past that ended with me building a nice end table out of birch. It was a ton of work! I'll write about it sometime. Anyway, David really captures what that kind of work is like. It is extremely cool reading about the woodworking process from the perspective of a talented professional.

They also graciously povide detailed plans on building your own bowl horse. I'd love to build one of those someday and try my hand at it. Reading this blog makes me want to get a proper workshop set up and get back to furniture making.

Thinking About Bluesky

2024-11-29T00:00:00Z

I joined Bluesky when it was still an invite-only network. I was one of the first one million users on the site! I was wildly apprehensive about the platform when I joined. The only concrete thing I knew about it was that it was supposed to be a "Twitter clone". I was a Twitter user for a few years and really came to intensely dislike time spent on it. Twitter was constantly showing me things I didn't want to see: advertisements, engagement bait from turbo trolls, people quote posting the engagement bait with "funny" responses - I barely ever saw posts from the people I followed on purpose. It was a test of patience every time I scrolled down. I eventually got fed up enough to not only stop using it, but to delete my account entirely. I didn't miss it, either. So, signing up for social network touted as a "twitter clone" knowing how much I came to hate Twitter is something I did a little reluctantly. I signed up because the core idea behind a platform like Twitter was really alluring: writing and reading microblogs with all your internet pals. It was astounding how much friction Twitter added to the core principle of the whole network.

Bluesky is supposedly doing things differently and differentiated itself pretty quickly to me. I'm honestly pretty impressed with it so far. The core idea of Bluesky is still virtually the same as Twitter but the key difference is that your timeline in Bluesky isn't algorithmic. I see posts from people I follow in chronological order. The very simple design of the timeline is combined with very robust moderation features like super effective blocking/muting, being able to detach quote posts if someone is being rude responding to one of your posts, and user run moderation lists that let you block hundreds of accounts with a single click. If you see things you don't want to see, you're empowered at every step to remove them from your view. It's so wildly different in its intent than a whatever Twitter became.

While it is fun to use right now I still remain a bit apprehensive about the platform. Bluesky still has to somehow make money, and it isn't clear how they plan to do that. It is important to remember that Bluesky is still a venture capital funded tech company, capable of doing all the venture capital funded tech company bullshit that we've all seen before. I've read they are planning on monetizing by providing subscription tiers offering things like "better quality video uploads" and etc, but it seems like the whole platform's userbase are expecting to be bombarded with advertisements now that the platform is taking off. Hopefully the idea of ads injected into your purposefully non-algorithmic feed being totally antithetical to the whole principle of the site keeps them from going down that path.

Things I like about the platform so far

I've outlined a few things that I am really enjoying about the platform so far in the list below. This list is pretty off-the-proverbial-cuff, and isn't exhaustive - but these are some real highlights.

Bluesky has a "block first" culture. Quoting a post in order to reply back is actually frowned upon because it gives the original posters exactly what they want: enagagement. People on Bluesky recognize that starving these bad accounts of engagement is how you make them fuck off forever. It rules.
User managed moderation lists are amazing. There are a lot of user made account lists that you can mute or block the entirity of with a single click. This is a hugely useful feature. I've subscribed to several moderation lists so far. Some notable ones are lists that track right wing propagandists, maga losers, crypto bozos, content scrapers, accounts using or pushing artificial intelligence, etc. This kind of moderation empowers me to see only what I want to see on my timeline. So good. I'm here to have fun, not get mad at nonsense.
Another moderation feature is that you can "detach" a quote post. People are able to reply to your posts in a "quote" format that shows the original post alongside their response. If someone does this in an abusive way you are able to "detach" their response from your post and it just looks like they are talking to themselves. Another way to starve bad actors of their engagement!
You can subscribe to different "lists" that give you a different timeline experience. "Quiet Posters" shows me posts from people I follow who don't post a lot so I don't miss them in the normal timeline. "Mutuals" lets me see posts only from my mutuals (people who follow each other). "Popular with friends" shows me some posts that are popular among folks in my network. There are other lists folks have made that group together posters around various topics such as science posters, photographers, writers, etc. I love lists.
I actually engage with people I follow, and they actually engage back. I think the whole userbase is slowly remembering that being online can be fun and not something that is designed by an entire product team to raise your blood pressure. It is very cool to see.
There are a lot of pet pictures. I post Donut on there quite a bit.

You can find me on bluesky here if you like. I'll see you out there!

Importing CDs like it's 2003

2024-11-23T00:00:00Z

I recently wrote about how I started using an old refurbished iPod nano. It is such a throwback! I've been loading it up with some digital purchases that I've gotten through bandcamp over the last couple years. I've only got four gigabytes of space on the device, so I'm unable to load up everything I have at once. It's difficult to choose what to sync! I think that the space restriction is sort of a fun dynamic - it's already gotten me to swap out several different albums!

When I used to have an mp3 player years ago I was getting all my music from CDs. I had to plop them into an optical drive, and import them in whatever software I was using to manage my collection. Eventually I moved to digital downloads from places like bandcamp as computers and laptops eventually moved away from coming with any kind of CD drives as the format became more and more obsolete.

Wholly obsolete as they are, I still have all my CDs from back then! I bought a cheap little external CD drive from Asus so I could get them all imported. The first time I used the thing it felt like I was operating the control on a time machine. I hadn't heard the spinning of a CD in a disc drive in such a long time and weirdly enough I found that I sort of missed the sound. A little quirk of using optical media is that the songs are imported into your computer's local file system as they get read one at a time, so you're able to start playing the first few tracks while the rest of them load in. It takes some time!

I loaded in four things from my CD collection to start. The rest of my music is stashed at my parents in a box somewhere. I think I started pretty strong with Björk, The Sugarcubes, Nine Inch Nails, and Broken Social Scene. My little crow figurine oversaw the proceedings.

Once this stack is done with, I'll sync them up to the iPod, power down my time machine, and take the dog out.

It's been a little while since I started using the iPod in earnest. So far I am mostly using the iPod aroud the house doing chores, and when I'm out walking the dog. I rarely take my phone with me when I'm doing laps around the neighborhood with the dog. I need a break from the screen sometimes. Taking music with me instead has been a real nice thing to have.

Now that winter is coming home to Chicago I might try to get a pair of headphones I can wear under a winter hat.

Ditching the Algorithm

2024-11-17T00:00:00Z

Services like Spotify have wildly changed my relationship with music. I used to have to work really hard to find things to listen to. I read blogs, I followed actual labels that published things I liked. I put things on my mp3 player and really spent time with them. I was engaged in all aspects of listening to music. I had to be my own kind of algorithm in that I was respnsible for sourcing not only the music itself, but also discovering what I liked and didn't like. Things are a lot different these days. I have the entirity of music at my fingertips through streaming services and I can offload the work of finding anything new to their recommendation systems. It's convenient and simple. I can let a streaming service like Spotify do all the heavy lifting of sourcing all the music for me, and if I like something it will recommend to me more of the same.

While things are easier than ever, and more good music is more available online than it has ever been - why do I feel so disengaged from it? I'm finding that how I engage with music has changed significantly. I spend a lot less time with specific artists and much more time jumping around to different things. I'm not really making my own choices of what I want to listen to. I am taking suggestions on what to hear next from a recommendation algorithm instead of making my own decisions. It is different and strange.

I decided recently to try and wrestle back some control for myself by getting an old iPod and becoming more active in my relationship with music. It's a little experiment. I want to restore some musical agency for myself and see if it gets me having more fun with music.

Do you remember what it was like to manage a digital music collection before streaming services like Spotify existed? It was difficult, and time intensive. You were constantly one hard drive failure away from losing all your songs. The cloud didn't exist yet, so if you weren't backed up to some kind of external hard drive then you'd have to start your collection all over. It happened to me more then once. It was devastating each time. It took a lot of effort to import songs from CDs, or build a collection over time from downloading albums here and there. Connections used to be slow! Sometimes you needed to manually enter all the song metadata yourself when importing them into your music application of choice if the program wasn't able to extract them properly. You had to manage album art too sometimes if the metadata was messed up. It was terrible! It was amazing!

Folks younger than me may not know that there was a period from around the year 2000 to 2006 where computers, phones, mp3 players, were fresh and exciting. Advances in storage and computing capabilities were happening constantly. Internet speeds were getting faster, and computer UX was getting increasingly better and better. Things that required immesnse technical know-how, or things that used to require intensely expensive hardware were becoming accessible. It felt genuinely transgressive being able to download music, or rip it from a CD, and then put that music onto a little device you could take with you anywhere. I don't think any consumer technology since has come close to how powerful it felt to be a young person going from dialup to broadband on the family computer and getting an mp3 player - all in the span of a couple years time.

Managing a music collection digitally wasn't without difficulties though. I wasn't good at keeping my computers backed up. I stopped managing my own collection after a hard drive failure in college where I lost everything - including my homework. Eventually, computers stopped having CD drives entirely. Phones started to get so advanced that having a dedicated mp3 player wasn't really necessary. Now that internet access on phones is so fast you don't even need to keep mp3s. You can just stream whatever you like from whatever device you're planted in front of. Streaming is the default now.

Streaming music over the internet is what we all dreamed of though, right? Endless information at the tips our fingers? If you told my ten year old self who was sharing the family computer on a 56k connection that dropped out whenever someone needed to make a phone call in the house that I'd be able to listen to whatever album I could think of as soon as I could think of it, I wouldn't have believed you. Today we can, and it remains incredible. But that level of convenience does come at a cost. You don't own any of the albums you stream. Streaming services can remove things and you might never be able to find them again. They may not have certain things at all. There are also bad externalities for artists. Streaming services don't pay artists enough, and artists may have to bend their sounds to appease whatever content recommendation algorithm a service has. It has shaken up the entire music industry, and that is probably putting it very lightly.

In the halcyon mp3 era days of yesteryear I had such a sense of ownership and pride in my musical discoveries. I used to find new artists or albums to listen to and spend genuine time with them. I'd put them on the mp3 player and take them with me on the train or the bus, to work and to school. I got to know them. Streaming services like Spotify have removed all of this personal investment and and as a result a lot of my personal enjoyment of music has evaporated. It all feels so impersonal and hyper-commodified.

I don't know if I'll quit online streaming entirely. Trying out new artists or genres has been made so easy that it would be hard to give that up completely. I do want to change how I engage personally though. I want to take my time with what I like and make some more conscious decisions about what I want to hear next instead of being told. I'd also like to start supporting artists more directly through actually buying their music. I'm hoping this experiment in personal engagement goes well. So far, it has been fun stepping back into the past and feeling some of that same excitement I felt back in the mp3 player days when all of this was shiny and new.

Donut says hello, and so do I

2024-11-04T00:00:00Z

Summer is over, and Fall is happening. It's been a strange year for me. I've felt tired and worn out for the whole of it. Not very much happened over the summer, it seems like I sleptwalk through it. I find myself wondering if the cold weather is going to wake me up, or if it will keep me feeling threadbare. I'm doing my best to wake up in the morning and choose to be an energized human being, but I am not getting hard on myself if I wake up feeling that to be an impossibility. I recently changed to a new SSRI medication. The old ones made me supernaturally tired and "flat" feeling. It is a little frustrating what an inexact science navigating these medications is, but they tell me that's the only way you really figure out what works. I always imagined changing your stars to be a little more romantic than that.

Anyway! I've picked up a little paper planner that I want to try to do some light weight "habit tracking" in. I find that to be a very loaded term that means a lot of wildly different things to different people. I'm trying to keep things simple. I have a few things I'd like to do more of such as working out, practicing guitar, drawing/journaling, etc. I want to use habit tracking as a way to provide a little bit of accountability to myself and also visualize at a glance whether or not I'm really succeeding in these little goals and participating in them, or just thinking about doing so. I don't want to involve any apps, or super involved bullet journaling workflows or layouts. All I need to see at the end of a particular week (this is a weekly paper planner) is whether or not I put in some effort. I am not tying to use habit tracking as a way to guilt myself into doing these things. That wouldn't be very helpful. I just want to celebrate slow and steady proress.

Oh, also: Donut says hi.

Today I am 35

2024-10-13T00:00:00Z

Matty Note: I am backdating this post, but the contents come from the date in question and are indeed authentic.

Today I am 35! Feeling ethereal.

Using an airplane galley cart as workshop storage

2024-05-25T00:00:00Z

Over the last few months I have been slowly building out a little workshop for myself in a spare bedroom. I wanted to create a space to work on art projects, do some small scale woodworking, and play around with my typewriter. I've never really had the luxury of a dedicated workspace before, and it feels really good to put one together. So far I've acquired a work bench, a shop stool, a little laptop desk for my typewriter, a growing amount of tools, and tool storage.

Storage has been the main challenge in the small space I have to work with. I've been reluctant to commit to shelf storage or other kinds of wall storage because I am not sure of the final layout I want for the room. The room was originally intended to be a bedroom which means there is some closet space I can use (abuse?) as storage for some of my more bulky items like my shop vac, and a folding Dewalt jobsite table. The closet also has a shelf which I am using to hold a few modestly sized storage bins to group some more oddly shaped things together. It is a pretty modest start. Most of my tool organization is already handled by the tool bags I have, but I still have a lot of things such as cutting and marking tools, art supplies, adhesives like glue or tape, stationary, etc that I wanted quick access to but also don't fit within the current set of options I had.

I bought two old airplane galley carts to use as storage in the shop. I really love these things. They are astonishingly functional! I got the idea for using these from the YouTube channel of Adam Savage - famous for being on the show "Mythbusters". I don't recall specifically what Adam used them for, or what episode I saw them on, but I do remember instantly being attracted to the idea of using one of these things. It would allow easy access to things I regularly need, allow me to stash it to the side easily, and honestly just look really stylish sitting in the workspace. This is the smaller of the two that I bought. It is a "half size" model. The second one is full-size and has twice the depth, but also has doors on both sides.

Look at the door hardware!

It is surprisingly lightweight, and is on casters so it can be easily moved around; there is also a break to keep it in place. The door latches closed, and can be opened wide enough to sit flush with the side of the unit out of the way. The inside storage is also totally configurable: all the drawers can be removed from the unit by sliding them out and reconfigured as needed. Being able to just roll the unit around has been fantastic. If I leave my workbench to sit in front of my laptop table with the typewriter I can just roll the unit over with me. I can also roll the unit out of the way if I need space for other things. The flexibility they give me in that way is nearly as good as their organizational capabilities.

I added some velcro to the top so I can stick stuff to the top of the unit and roll it around without worrying about anything falling off if I bump it into something.

The one major downside to these galley carts is that they are expensive; the shipping costs were especially unforgiving. Drawers for these carts are also relatively expensive as well. However I still feel really good about the purchase. I use them constantly, and really enjoy them. Sometime in the near future I'll make a few more drawers out of pine or something for the larger unit I have. In the mean time though, I'll be slapping stickers all over the sides of these things.

Meet My Dog Donut

2024-05-18T00:00:00Z

Matty Note: Hello there reader! If you want to skip the background about how sad I was feeling pre-dog and get straight to the dog pics, click here to meet my dog Donut. Don't worry about it!

Before Donut

In the begginning of 2023 I was feeling pretty down. I had moved to a new place, I had an impotant relationship end, and I was in the middle of navigating the rocky landscape of mental health care. My new apartment was virtually empty. I tossed a lot of things I owned when I moved out of my old place. I had no furnuture beyond a couch, a bed frame, and a little table in the kitchen that had survived the purge. The walls were bare, and unpainted. I patched some holes, but I couldn't decide on paint so I left the job half finished. I was stuck in a miasma of bad feelings and I couldn't see the way forward for myself. The new year passed, and soon enough it was March in Chicago. It was cold, dreary, and I was lonely.

I had moved into this place a few months prior in November of 2022, and I was excited! I was ready for the challenge of building out a new space for myself. During the pandemic I had left my home on the North side of Chicago and moved back with my parents. I had lived up on the North side for over a decade, and moving back home was very difficult for me. I felt very defeated when I moved back in with them. I had meant to stay a few months until I found a new place to rent, but ended up staying a year (big oof). It was very difficult living with them again after being so independent for so long. It was very emotionally draining as well. There was so much relief felt when I moved into the new place. I finally had some real momentum - which I hadn't felt since the start of pandemic.

The momentum and hopeful feelings about starting fresh in my new space unfortunately were not lasting feelings. My personal life, and my mental health issues were only part of why my good feelings evaporated. Another contributor was that my expectations of my life in the new space just did not align with the reality life in the new space. I lost access to nearby parks in the old neighborhood, there was a phenominal amount of road noise in the morning and evenings at my new apt, I also slowly realized that meeting my friends somewhere usually meant an hour and a half odyssey on Chicago's struggling CTA. It was very jarring. Things just were not feeling right and it brought me down.

I spent a few months being completely stuck. I felt strongly that I needed to make a change in my life. I made a big change. I adopted a dog from a local shelter.

Meet Donut!

I had always wanted a dog. My previous home where I lived for ten years didn't allow dogs over a certain size, so I never got one. Being denied a dog was one of the reasons I moved out of that place and back to my parents. There were other reasons too of course: the pandemic, cockroaches (haha), being unable to find a new place before the lease was up, no central air, blah blah. There were a confluence of issues, but the dog thing was always something that bothered me about living there. My plan at my new place was to get situated and then try to find a shelter to work with for adoption. It took a little while, but immediately after I got a couch, I went to find a dog.

This is Donut! He is a (roughly) three year old mixed breed. The shelter where I adopted him thought he was mostly likely some kind of German Shepard and Husky mix. He's got a lot of features of both breeds: double coat, giant paws, brushy tail, and he's super vocal. His name at the shelter was "Galen" and I just could not make that work. It just felt really odd to say. I decided to call him Donut because he was a real sweetie, and because I really wanted a coffee.

Look at those little dots he's got for eyebrows! Cute! What a distinguished little gentleman!

I live in a neighborhood with a lot of dogs (like, a cartoonish amount), and I was wary of adopting a dog that was not chill with other dogs being around. This was going to be my first time as a dog owner and I didn't want to adopt more than I'd be able to handle. That wouldn't have been fair to the dog, and it would have been super stressful for me. When I initially reached out to the shelter they sent me a series of questions about what exactly I was looking for, and what my experience level was. I was really appreciative of this because it gave me a little time to reflect on what I was looking for in a companion, but also become more aware of the responsibilities of dog ownership. They were very nice to work with, and were able to answer some of my more basic questions about stuff like behavioral differences in male/females as well as adoption logistics.

After a little communicating we sheduled a shelter visit to meet some dogs they thought I would be a good fit for.

I met Donut at the shelter during a walk through the kennels, he was the only dog that brought a toy over to me when I visited his cubicle. He was very excited to meet me! I asked to meet him outside his cubicle, and they took us both to an outdoor play area to hang out for a bit. He was so pumped up he ran circles around me. We played with a little toy for a while and I talked to the volunteer about what to expect from him if I were to leave with him. Eventually, I decided to bring him home with me.

Prior to adopting, I did a lot of research on YouTube and other places about dog ownership. I wanted to know what to expect, how to handle problems, get an idea of what the adjustment period after adoption would be like, and most importantly I wanted to know how to manage the dog and train him. I did my best to prepare and learn how to be a "good" dog owner to the extent that was possible. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, and how my own life and schedule would need to adjust. I knew that the little guy would depend on me for everything: food, water, love, exercise, and etc. I also imagined how transformative and fun having a dog would be. I imagined spending time outside at cafes with the dog, long walks, cuddling, going on adventures, and all the fun stuff that comes with dog ownership.

I was really excited to bring Donut home. I wanted a pup for so long and finally had one! I was ready for him! I realized quickly though that my expectations of dog ownership were not aligned with reality. There's a theme developing here!

Donut was really great inside the house, but outside he was an absolute terror. His leash training really didn't exist. He'd also lunge at people and other dogs. He wasn't aggressive or anything but he just really really really wanted to meet everyone he encountered. It was exhausting. I started to take him out at odd hours to decrease our chances of meeting other people and dogs because I was having a tough time keeping 55 pounds of Donut from pulling towards them. There are so many dogs in my neighborhood though that it became a very frustrating game of pac-man that I'd inevitably lose whenever I played.

I also severely underestimated just how much physical work a dog would be. I live on the third floor and I need to go up and down stairs to take him out. He's gotta go out minimum about six times a day. I usually take him around the block when he goes out otherwise he doesn't use the bathroom enough and will bother me to go out again in 30 minutes. He also had absolutely boundless energy. No amount of walking seemed to make him tired. We'd get back from outside and he'd want to play!

My ability to do work also suffered. I worked from home and until Donut really got adjusted to my schedule it was really hard to do my job. Even after he got adjusted, it was still hard. I'd have to get up to take him out, or whatever and be interrupted almost routinely. It was hard to come back from outside - tired - and sit down to begin work again.

I'm not ashamed to say that the first few months had me depressed. I had fantasized about having a dog and what I had imagined just wasn't the reality. The reality was a lot of work. I went from being mostly sedentary during the day to walking something like 10k steps, and doing that every day. I didn't have a lot of energy to do anything but manage the dog. It really drained me. My fantasy of hanging out at cafes and outdoor seating really wasn't possible with him freaking out whenever he saw a dog or if a person looked at him or said "hi". It was a really really difficult period of adjustment. I think most new dog owners probably must have a similar emotional response to the realities of dog ownership. No two dogs are alike, and they all have their own unique challenges. I wasn't able to socialize Donut as a puppy. I adopted a two year old dog who wasn't neutered and spent an unknown amount of time as a stray. I had to meet him where he was at, and I had to adjust my expectations.

It took a lot of work to train him enough to where taking him around the block on the leash wasn't an arduous task. I had to teach him almost everything. The only thing he knew how to do when I got him was "sit", but he certainly wasn't interested in "stay". His time as a stray also led to some challenging behaviors like picking up almost anything he could off the ground and trying to eat it.

While he had some problems - and still does - he also has a ton of good qualities, too. Firstly, he's absolutely cute as heck. He is such a happy and friendly guy. He loves to meet people, and loves to meet other dogs. He's not aggressive at all, good around kids, he doesn't chew on anything but his toys (and boy howdy, does he chew those), and he's super smart and has been able to pick up new things pretty quickly with positive reinforcement. He's very loyal and loves to hang out with me! He's also very vocal which is both funny, sweet, and sometimes a little annoying - but in a very charming way.

Eventually I did adjust to life with the dog, just as I eventually adjusted to life in my new neighborhood. Both took a lot of time and patience. A year+ later, he's still a real pain in my ass sometimes, but I love him and I really cannot imagine my home without him.

What a doofus.

Writing Letters to Strangers

2024-05-07T00:00:00Z

How would you introduce yourself to a stranger? Let your subconscious mull that over for a minute.

Recently I bought a brand-new old typewriter. I bought it with the purpose of sending letters and post cards to friends. So far I've sent several, and the experience has been quite enjoyable. It feels great to open up a USPS drop box and dump in several pieces of mail at once. I've lived so long within the confines of the instant feedback internet-age that waiting for the mail is so outside my normal life experience that it is fun. It is also a little thrilling not having any idea where my silly communiques are at any given time. The only feedback one gets when mailing a letter after a quick glance at the little pickup schedule printed on the lid of a USPS drop box is the loud smack of metal banging together as the creaky drawer closes and absorbs your mail into the very edge of the postal system.

Since I started writing my friends I think I've discovered a real love of sending and getting mail.

Pretty quickly though I realized that I needed to find an additional outlet for all this new excitement I had for snail-mailing. I didn't want to flood my friends with postcards or letters every week - or make too much work for them if they felt like responding. I had no idea that a place like TypePals even existed until I heard Joe Van Cleave discuss it on their YouTube channel: it is a typewriter focused pen-pal community! I was aware that some pen-pal communities existed online, but I was surprised to find one almost wholly focused on typewriters. It seemed like a nice community of type nerds who were having a good time sending each other letters and post cards in the same manner I was already sending to my friends from "real life". So, I decided to join the site and see if slow correspondence through the mail was something I wanted to pursue. Some folks really make a hobby out of it - maybe I would too.

Within days of joining TypePals I received a wonderful letter from someone welcoming me to the site. I was grateful for not having to make the first move as the hard work of making contact was done for me. The person who wrote me gave me several questions to answer and also set the tone of the introduction like one would in any face to face conversation. Writing a reply felt simple. I just followed the rhythm of their letter. I told them a little about myself and how I arrived at Typepals, as well as how I became interested in typewriters. Being in the position to send a reply as my first message gave me the needed confidence to start reaching out to folks.

But again, how do you introduce yourself to a stranger? How do you abbreviate your life and what you're all about in a couple sheets of A5 newsprint? It was daunting looking at a stack of empty paper trying to answer that question, but what I decided was that it wasn't necessary to even make an attempt to be thorough. The stakes here are low. In the best case I start a correspondence with someone and possibly make a friend, but in the worst case I get some desperately needed typing practice. While I hope to get replies from everyone - I'm reminding myself that I should be realistic and I shouldn't expect replies from everyone I reach out to. I think recognizing that really took the pressure off in my introductions! I didn't want to write stuffy and serious letters anyway. I'm doing this for fun!

I decided to keep it light, and give myself permission to ramble a little bit (which I would have done anyway!). I told folks about where I live, the plans I have for spring and summer, about my dog, why I decided to get a loud manual typewriter, and I asked them about themselves. I did my best to bring my real self with these letters. Each letter was a little different from the last: in content, length, and how much I let myself ramble. TypePals has profiles for members where we're able to fill in a biography along with our interests, so there were plenty of topics at hand to ask about. I left in all the typos. I read a quote once that said something like: "how someone writes a letter is a view into their personality" - I can't think of a better window into my own personality than a typo-filled letter on hand-cut-to-A5-size newsprint.

Since my first letter sent as a reply, I've introduced myself to three new people across the US and (so far) Australia. These are just the beginnings of a slow-motion conversation! Like any other conversation, you just have to follow it wherever it takes you. That has always come naturally to me when speaking to others face to face; I am hoping for snail-mail to be no different.

The first letter I recieved ended with a wonderful sign-off that was completed with a beautiful stamp of a rattlesnake in a column adjacent to the author's address. I decided to adopt something similar for myself using a stamp of a pine cone. The newsprint absorbs the ink of the stamp well, thankfully.

PS: I just got a postcard from Canada while I was finishing up this post! Cool!

Simple Advice for Building Habits

2024-05-04T00:00:00Z

All credit for this advice goes to the YouTube channel of Christopher Budnick, and specifically the video they made called "How to read every book you own". I really love this channel. Channels like this are such a breath of fresh air on YouTube where it seems like everyone is trying to sell something or game the algorithm to increase exposure at the expense of a soul. Christopher's videos have soul in spades. They are fantastically produced and the content is right up my alley.

Christopher gives a lot of great advice in that video but the thing that stuck out to me the most was in his suggestion of visualizing a future-you where you are successful in your habit. The example of the video was reading books every night. Imagine your future self maybe a year from now with a successful reading habit and also think about how that makes your future self feel, and how transformative that could be for you. I think this is so simple and great!

I thought it would be fun to try and use my typewriter to write about Christopher's advice and some feelings I had about it. I provided a transcription below the photo of my post. I typed this on some newsprint with narrow margins, and used an iphone to take a panoramic photo of it. Panoramic photos of text are very sensitive to changes in the elevation of the phone it would seem. I'll experiement with better ways of scanning or photographing these in the future.

Typewritten note transcription

I came across some advice recently. The simplicity of it took me a little off-guard. The subject of the original discussion was in developing a reading habit. I'm in something of a transitional period of my mid-30s right now and have been having a struggle of my own in developing good habits for myself. A shedule of household work, sleep hygiene, eating right - everything. I used to read a lot but stopped years ago after getting into a rough patch mentally. The specifics aren't very important, but a lot of things in my life I was able to take care of previously became very challenging for me. Reading books was one of the many things I just sort of stopped doing during that time.

I've started and stopped trying to resume the habit of reading a few times now but I keep bouncing off of it. I think I may be able to get myself back into the habit now that I've heard the advice: imagine what your future life would be like if you read for 15 or 30 minutes every day. Imagine how that would benefit your future self.

That is all the advice was. Just to imagine a slightly more self disciplined self. It isn't self-critical, it is self-positive. Just imagine how transformative having spend that time reading could be.

Visualizing a goal in this way I feel is very powerful. It is so easy to get caught in a shame-cycle when we fail to meet our goals but having an idea of what success looks like for yourself - at least for me - allows me to get through the low spots when self discipline might be the most difficult. It also allows you to focus on what you want to get out of the habit/hobby/whatever. It focuses you back to your ability to grow and change for the better, and not wallow or become stuck where you're at.

Simple enough.

My Brand-New Old Typewriter

2024-05-02T00:00:00Z

I recently bought a Smith-Corona Galaxie. It is a fully manual portable typewriter manufactured in 1960. It's an impressive machine. Typewriters have always been fascinating to me. They are tools that have existed totally outside of their original context for so long they've become enigmatic. I've only known them as wholly obsolete objects that had no place in the newly digital world I grew up in. They existed to me almost entirely as set-dressing in old film and tv: I had never seen one in person.

They had been such a constant in the lives of so many for so long that their replacement by computers in the 80s and 90s and their seeming absence struck me as baffling. I couldn't really figure out how such a successful piece of technology became obsolete with such finality. Were they really that obsolete after all? I still can't really answer that question, but there are a not-insignificant amount of enthusiasts who still love using these hulking machines to write.

I decided to buy one of my own after stumbling across the YouTube channel of Joe Van Cleave. Specifically, I saw a video of Joe's where they used a typewriter to write out a message onto an adhesive shipping label, then attach it to a postcard in the space where one would normally put a hand-written message. This was immediately very attractive to me. Lately I had been regreting losing touch with some people in my life and the idea of snail mailing occasionally to keep in touch was something that was rattling around the back of my mind for a long time. Sending a nicely typed postcard in the manner Joe did in his video seemed perfect to me. Partially - I am only slightly ashamed to admit - because I have atrocious handwriting, but mostly because it just seemed really fun. The machine Jow used was super big and made a huge racket in their video but they also ended up with a great final product.

Could you do the same thing with a computer and a printer? Yes, of course. You can do almost anything with a computer, but I spend my entire professional life in front of computers and thinking about talking to computers and I'm tired of them. The experience of writing someone a message on a manual typewriter seemed like an almost romantic alternative to using a laptop. I did a lot of research and decided on a Smith-Corona Galaxie. It seemed to be a well regarded portable machine by several enthusiasts, so I decided to buy one. When it arrived I was a little worried I had made a mistake. It sort of smelled like a wet basement, which is what I half-expected from a used (but serviced!) typewriter from something like sixty years ago. I rolled in a sheet of test paper and banged out some nonsense and I knew right when I heard the end-of-line bell and hit the carriage return lever that this thing was really special.

What I've found so far in writing on a typewriter is that the experience is similar to writing with a pen and paper. It is significantly slower, it requires actual honest-to-goodness editing, and patience. You'll make mistakes, and you'll either need to fix them, start over, or furiously backspace to strike them through and continue on. I am enjoying it. It is immensely tactile. The keys on my machine take a not-insignificant amount of force in order for consistent lettering to be trasfered to the page. Hearing the bell sound when you near the end of a line, hitting the carriage return lever, and then sliding the entire carriage back to the beginning of a line is just thrilling.

I admit that the satisfying feelings I get from typing on a fully mechanical machine could be in-part due to some accidental nostalgia I've accrued through some process of cultural osmosis of film and television. I'd concede that the development of a serious computer allergy after spending way too much time in front of them also has something to do with how much I'm enjoying this contraption as well. I have to say though, the more letters and postcards I send to friends on my Galaxie the more I enjoy it. It is immensely satisfying to roll in a piece of paper and literally bang out several paragraphs while enjoying all the physical feedback. It isn't an experience you can get digitally. Like any mechanical thing, there will be issues eventually, but for now I'm really happy with it.

I'll try to get a scan of the manual the machine came with online once I am able to do so. For now: enjoy the carriage-return video below.

A Prelude

2024-04-15T00:00:00Z

A blog seems to come into being from nothing, doesn't it? Conjured from the aether of the net by would-be sorcerers, they are truly fragile things when born. A blog often will start with a single introductory post and no audience to read it, and no well defined voice of an author to speak it. This one is no different. My powers as a sorcerer are only strong enough to provide the same stereotypical start of any blog that pops into being on the internet.

This first post should be considered a prelude to the construction of a real honest to goodness internet web log. I want to have an outlet which will allow me to share and document my failures and successes in whatever creative or non-creative pursuits I have in front of me. I want a no-pressure sketchbook: not a precious and curated thing. Though, it is also important to me that I develop a strong voice as a writer as this web log grows into something special.

Thanks for being here with me. Ta.