I started sending postcards to people again recently. A while back when I got my typewriter, I signed up for TypePals.com and started snail mailing folks. It was a lot of fun; I wrote a bit about it here.

Recently I decided to sign up for a postcrossing.com. Postcrossing is a postcard exchange site with a huge membership. I started keeping a log of all the postcards I've been sending folks since I joined!

This is my distraction log for May of 2026. I outline some things that I've been distracted by during the month of May.

This post is part of the Distraction Log series.

Personal websites are living things and are never really finished. There is always something to tweak, to optimize, or to experiment with.

Over the last several months on ersatz.website I've made some changes to the site's stylesheet to fix some accessibility issues, restructured it a bit to make it easier to modify, and other related changes. I made some good changes, but I had a difficult time making them. My HTML markup across my 11ty static site templates was inconsistent, and my CSS often combined structure rules with presentation rules. This made things confusing to read, and a little risky to change. Overloaded CSS rules and inconsistent markup make things brittle and easily breakable. I could fix things in the context of what I was looking at, but unkowingly break something elsewhere. This kind of thing can happen over long periods of time as markup and styles are added and removed.

I could have developed some basica automated browser tests for myself so I could do a lot of editing and refactoring and ensure I didn't break anything while I was working, but that would be a lot of work just to maintain the same design.

Instead of developing some kind of tedious automated test suite that would blow up on any visual regressions in a fantastical effort to keep things exactly the same, I decided I should do a redesign and start from a fresh place.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm listening to audio books now! It's alright!

I turned 36 and lit a campfire

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.

I almost declared Emacs "bankruptcy" and started my configuration over. Instead, I cleaned it up a bit and released it.

I wrote a README for how to manage ersatz.website and it was out of date and wrong. I caused an outage on accident because of it.

I am trying to make the transition to a split keyboard and it is going okay!

It is very cold here. A status update during the deep freeze.

David Lynch died on January 16th. They were an important influence that I will miss.

Tonight is NYE. It's been a long year. Here is a list of my New Year's resolutions

Running a blog is hard, but writing psuedo-anonymously makes it a bit easier and takes some of the pressure off.

I went for a bike ride on christmas eve; it was nice

I am up late listening to Hiroshi Yoshimura

I have created a collection of links to cool websites, blogs, digital gardens, and other resources that I enjoy or find useful.

I am finding new blogs to read. This is the first post in a series where I will share some cool blogs that I found.

A few thoughts I have about the Bluesky social network after being on it for several months

I started importing some CDs with an external drive to my music collection

I recently bought an old iPod because I recognized that my relationship with music has changed a lot over the years and I missed how simple things used to be!

I've been gone for a while, hi

Recently I bought an old airplane galley cart that I've started to use for storage in my workshop.

I have a dog! His name is Donut! Meet him!

Starting a pen-pal relationship is difficult.

Simple advice I found recently for building habits in a healthier way

I bought a typewriter.

The first post of the mattyblog/ersatz blog.