about
- diff --git a/public/an-ode-to-gitsync/index.html b/public/an-ode-to-gitsync/index.html index 59f35b2..407c842 100644 --- a/public/an-ode-to-gitsync/index.html +++ b/public/an-ode-to-gitsync/index.html @@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ +Since I moved this site to Hugo, I’ve been using an app called GitJournal to post from my phone. I have a beautiful desk setup with a clacky mechanical keyboard that’s a joy to write on, but the simple fact is that I’m a lazy shit and want to update my blog from the couch. It’s all mostly worked fine, with some headaches. I originally intended to use GitJournal to store my Github repo to my phone’s filesystem and then point an Obsidian1 vault at that.
Unfortunately, GitJournal currently cannot store the repo in the Android filesystem due to a permissions issue, so I can’t use it with Obsidian. GitJournal’s note-taking app is serviceable, but again, I want to use Obsidian. I’ve been making-do with GitJournal for a few months now — for once in my life, not fixing what’s broken — operating under the assumption that there were no other options.
Allow me to repeat myself: I am a lazy shit.
diff --git a/public/breaking-silences/index.html b/public/breaking-silences/index.html index 59ffcf0..4b1e33d 100644 --- a/public/breaking-silences/index.html +++ b/public/breaking-silences/index.html @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ I am the faculty advisor for my middle school’s GSA. I have been for years now, and it’s something I’m very proud of, but this year especially I feel I have a great crop of kids that I’m really connecting with. At my town’s Pride festival in early June, my club had a booth selling crafts the kids had made to raise funds. The kids filtered in and out to help sell goods, but mostly I think they just valued having a “home base” at the event. For me, it was a long, socially draining day, but speaking to them afterward about the experience and hearing them tell me how at home they felt at the festival, how comfortable they felt being themselves, was so gratifying. "> +Last time I updated this blog, I wrote about silences in my professional career. These past few weeks, I feel I am doing the work to break mine.
I am the faculty advisor for my middle school’s GSA. I have been for years now, and it’s something I’m very proud of, but this year especially I feel I have a great crop of kids that I’m really connecting with. At my town’s Pride festival in early June, my club had a booth selling crafts the kids had made to raise funds. The kids filtered in and out to help sell goods, but mostly I think they just valued having a “home base” at the event. For me, it was a long, socially draining day, but speaking to them afterward about the experience and hearing them tell me how at home they felt at the festival, how comfortable they felt being themselves, was so gratifying.
I also (inadvertently) walked into orientation for our incoming students. Our guidance counselor, who was giving the presentation, asked me to talk to the kids about the clubs I run; when I mentioned Pride Club, a handful of kids immediately lit up and excitedly looked at each other. I often feel I’m not achieving as much as I could be with the club, but I have to remind myself of how much it means to those kids — even if it’s only five or ten of them.
diff --git a/public/cassie-ink-is-my-new-home/index.html b/public/cassie-ink-is-my-new-home/index.html index ccaa2d4..d30a8b8 100644 --- a/public/cassie-ink-is-my-new-home/index.html +++ b/public/cassie-ink-is-my-new-home/index.html @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ This blog started on bearblog.dev as cassie.land. Bearblog is a great platform, but I wanted a challenge in my life, I guess, so I taught myself to use Hugo and moved to esotericbullshit.net (cassie.land was repurposed for my NAS). I love the esotericbullshit moniker and URL — it makes me laugh — but as it turns out, it’s kind of hard to share your link when it contains profanity.1 Perhaps that’s copium for a growing domain purchasing addiction, but I intend to make this one stick. "> +I moved domains, again.
This blog started on bearblog.dev as cassie.land. Bearblog is a great platform, but I wanted a challenge in my life, I guess, so I taught myself to use Hugo and moved to esotericbullshit.net (cassie.land was repurposed for my NAS). I love the esotericbullshit moniker and URL — it makes me laugh — but as it turns out, it’s kind of hard to share your link when it contains profanity.1 Perhaps that’s copium for a growing domain purchasing addiction, but I intend to make this one stick.
I have a long history with blogging. I posted on livejournal from 2007-2012 several times a week, with mundane accounts of my day and fragile mental state2. In 2013, I moved to a private Dreamwidth blog, and then to a WordPress blog in 2014. Each time I moved, I had the compulsion to backport all of my old writing, but I liked the idea of a fresh start — and I felt each time that I was a new, improved version of me with a distinct voice.
diff --git a/public/categories/index.html b/public/categories/index.html index b5caa9c..d7bd56e 100644 --- a/public/categories/index.html +++ b/public/categories/index.html @@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ +I read a thread online recently about bisexuality: folks were discussing use of the label compared to something like pansexual. Many folks within the LGBTQ+ umbrella argue that pansexual is a more inclusive label than bisexual, as bi- upholds a binary view of gender.
My relationship with my bisexuality has been fraught. I can pinpoint in specificity where I feel it started: in the sixth grade (for me, 2005 or 2006), reading the sex ed chapter in my science textbook, I was presented with the three sexualities — heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. I had, by that point, already started puberty and experienced low-level attraction. I’d been confused that that attraction never seemed to have a distinct target: I liked boys and I liked girls. I remember an immediate sense of comfort and belonging in the term. That’s allowed?, I thought. Reading it in a textbook made it seem so simple. Then surely that’s the way to be.
Through the rest of middle and high school, I continued to experience attraction in this way, but the word suddenly felt more complicated. I lived in an extremely conservative town; there were only a handful of openly queer kids, and I was inundated with queerphobic messaging — that bisexuality was just a phase, that everyone is a little bicurious during puberty. I digested it and refused the label, even as friends privately insisted to me that being in love with Natalie Portman wasn’t something straight women experienced.
diff --git a/public/css/main.css b/public/css/main.css index e85693d..de1e339 100644 --- a/public/css/main.css +++ b/public/css/main.css @@ -373,6 +373,15 @@ nav ul { } } +.cover { + width: 100%; + height: 100vw; + max-height: 500px; + background-size: cover; + background-position: center; + margin-top: 10px; +} + /* section */ .section article h2 a { text-decoration: none; diff --git a/public/dad/index.html b/public/dad/index.html index 2059e23..12bc9e4 100644 --- a/public/dad/index.html +++ b/public/dad/index.html @@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ +My father left when I was six and never stopped leaving. At school events, scheduled visits, personal lows, I scanned the crowd for his face and didn’t find it. I grew used to his absence and started to resent the appearances he made; when he did show up, I’d wish he hadn’t. At my college graduation, he parted with the gift, “I’m glad you’re not a fuck up like me,” turning my achievements into his own deluded, narcissistic pursuit of sympathy. He at least — and unwittingly — stumbled upon a truth: I succeeded despite his example and influence. Never because of it.
diff --git a/public/early-thoughts-on-pokemon-unbound/index.html b/public/early-thoughts-on-pokemon-unbound/index.html index 480eff2..d586451 100644 --- a/public/early-thoughts-on-pokemon-unbound/index.html +++ b/public/early-thoughts-on-pokemon-unbound/index.html @@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ +I downloaded Pokémon: Unbound the other day to play alongside my partner. We are both big Pokémon fans — like buy the new games every year fans — though my interest has waned over the last few years (I loved Legends Arceus and generally felt that Scarlet/Violet were slaps in the face1). I have fond memories of the classic games, and I’ve read a lot of positive buzz about Unbound.
I’m fairly certain that this is the first proper ROM hack I’ve played, not counting a few randomizers that I’ve cooked up for fun (and, for the most part, played for an afternoon or two and abandoned). Unbound is incredibly feature-rich and ambitious; it adds a great deal of quality of life options as well as formidable challenge options for the hardcore2. I fall into the category of a more casual fan, so I was pleased to see things like effectiveness and STAB indicators hacked into the Fire Red/Leaf Green engine. Unbound also introduces a mission log and proper side quests; what I saw did not innovate much beyond fetch quests and “do this thing x amount of times then come back,” but some had short but charming stories to follow (like the Sandslash stealing food from a local family).
Unbound also has an original story that consumes a considerable amount of the player’s time. There’s a (for a Pokémon game) lengthy introduction cutscene that tells of the history of the region, and the player is introduced to a rogue organization that is aiming to capture the legendary birds to activate some doomsday device that will engulf the region in darkness. For Pokémon, the broad strokes aren’t far off from something like X/Y’s story — evil guy wants to destroy the world for some reason and you must stop them. I found the story mostly beneath notice, unfortunately; the game introduced a bunch of characters early on, and it is hard to care much about them when you have so many. In the opening hours of the game, for example, you meet your rival and Professor Log. Your rival is pretty standard Pokémon faire: brash and driven and uninterested in listening to the Professor’s advice, unlike the silent protagonist. Professor Log sends you off on various errands, one of which is to check in with his friend Arthur in the next town over, an expert on the history of the region; Arthur then introduces you to Jax, yet another young and ambitious trainer; and that’s not counting all of the villains and various gangs you meet in the introductory hours. I have some faith that Unbound has unique plans for these characters in the narrative, but the balance between clicking through story and actually engaging in the exploring and battling feels skewed: Unbound is dragged down by the weight of its ambition to be a Pokémon game with a story.
diff --git a/public/emily-dickinson-queer-theory/index.html b/public/emily-dickinson-queer-theory/index.html index b3d1c07..a7759d0 100644 --- a/public/emily-dickinson-queer-theory/index.html +++ b/public/emily-dickinson-queer-theory/index.html @@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ +The lives of many literary greats remain a relative mystery; literary critics and historians are often left to piece together details from letters, documentation, and, sometimes controversially, the author’s work read for repeated motifs. They then draw what conclusions they can about the authors’ lives. One of the most prolific female poets in the English literary canon, Emily Dickinson’s life is preserved in letters and artifacts from her life. When examined as a body of work, Dickinson’s poetry reveals a pattern of focus on women’s interior lives and relationships that may be regarded as queer, especially with the added dimension of her close relationship with her sister-in-law. This essay examines a selection of her poems through a queer lens, highlighting the poems’ relationships to female love and Dickinson’s life and arguing against established patterns of erasing Dickinson’s queer identity.
Critical representation of Dickinson paints her an immensely private, reclusive individual. Known in her Massachusetts home of Amherst as “the Myth,” Dickinson “lived a nun-like existence, wearing only white, seeing no one but her sister, writing poems that almost no one saw” (Nicholson). This suggests that the aforementioned canonical portrait of Dickinson is mostly accurate, but though she saw few in person, she had a rich inner existence, expressed in her many poems and letters. Indeed, both her poems and letters were directed to her “most trusted literary audience,” Sue Dickinson (née Gilbert) (Nell Smith 56). Dickinson shared “about 250 poems” with Gilbert, “by far the largest number” compared to Dickinson’s other family members and acquaintances (Franklin 3). While the particulars of their relationship are lost to time, Dickinson and Gilbert unarguably shared an intimate connection; many of Dickinson’s poems are directed, either explicitly or implicitly, to Gilbert. Despite this, “until recently most literary critics have refused to acknowledge her love for other women,” instead continuing to prop up the image of the maidenly recluse (Faderman 43). Twentieth century critics, acknowledging the romantic and erotic contents of Dickinson’s poems, embarked on a “quest for the identity of this ‘reclusive spinster’s’ elusive (male) love,” though evidence shows “no significant heterosexual involvements until [Dickinson] was well into middle age” (Faderman 43). More recent literary criticism examines Dickinson’s poetry through a queer lens, but there is a long history of criticism going to “great lengths to explain away the content of same-sex love in her poems” (Faderman 45).
Suggestions of intimate female relationships are easy to identify within Dickinson’s vast collection of poems. In “Ourselves were wed one summer - dear,” Dickinson laments the end of a close relationship. The cause of separation is left obscure: Dickinson writes that “Our Futures different lay,” indicating that their lives lead them down diverging pathways, but also writes that the speaker’s object’s “little Lifetime failed” (Dickinson 9, 3). This adds a characteristically grim undercurrent to the poem, and may either be a physical or metaphorical death. The intimacy of the relationship is nonetheless underscored as Dickinson writes that she “wearied - too - of mine” after her object’s life ended (Dickinson 4). Dickinson therefore expresses that her life lacks meaning or value without her beloved. In the poem’s final stanza, Dickinson affirms that the poem describes a relationship between two women, writing that “we were Queens” (Dickinson 15) – the speaker and her object are therefore definitively female.
diff --git a/public/fx-chains-by-the-utterly-inept/index.html b/public/fx-chains-by-the-utterly-inept/index.html index fb87f49..465be32 100644 --- a/public/fx-chains-by-the-utterly-inept/index.html +++ b/public/fx-chains-by-the-utterly-inept/index.html @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ In case it was not clear, I am not a professional. I am a blockhead who likes to tinker and who has watched a lot of YouTube videos. These are the FX chains I use for my voice, which may or may not be helpful to other people who do not have my voice. This is also not an exhaustive audio guide or overview of how I edit my audio. Maybe another time. "> +Once upon a time ago (and a time, and a time), I had a podcast. I miss podcasting dearly and think about going back often — otherwise, what am I to do with a partial, flawed understanding of normalizing to a target loudness and editing around the disgusting noises my mouth makes? Well, share it with others, of course.1
In case it was not clear, I am not a professional. I am a blockhead who likes to tinker and who has watched a lot of YouTube videos. These are the FX chains I use for my voice, which may or may not be helpful to other people who do not have my voice. This is also not an exhaustive audio guide or overview of how I edit my audio. Maybe another time.
Currently, I use a RØDE Procaster as my microphone and a MOTU M2 as my interface. I have a Fethead between the two because otherwise people complain I am too quiet on Discord. I bought a pop filter designed for the RØDE Podmic; it fits on my Procaster and works, but it looks a little ridiculous, so sometimes I get risqué and take it off. I paid several hundred dollars for this setup so that I can capture my two dollar voice with fidelity.
diff --git a/public/hate-for-the-island/index.html b/public/hate-for-the-island/index.html index 8a6823f..247e0ef 100644 --- a/public/hate-for-the-island/index.html +++ b/public/hate-for-the-island/index.html @@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ +I was born and raised on Long Island in a hamlet that rests along the Great South Bay.1 Known to most as a ferry town, this charming suburb lives and breathes the ocean. Most every resident has access to some kind of boat, whether through personal ownership or advantageous friendship. In the 90s, the town was voted the “friendliest town in America,” a slogan that still adorns the sign as you drive into town, by a mysterious group that awards such superlatives. That accolade, along with our yacht clubs, country clubs, lack of racial diversity, and generalized fear of anything outside the norm makes the town the near picture of 1950s suburban ideal.
In high school, the boys play football and the girls cheer them on; they graduate, marry, inherit the estate of their landed parents (who go on to relocate to the Hamptons or some other rich, desirable location), and have children of their own, thus completing their cyclical destiny. They do not fight. They do not divorce. They do not struggle, financially. They avoid anything seen as even slightly improper, for fear of damaging their social standing. And should the rebellious teenager stray out of line, their indiscretions quickly disappear, through privilege and influence and money. These people live happily trapped in their ticky-tacky homes and in their ticky-tacky lives.
I have always felt at odds with that world. In high school, for an English class free-write, I composed an essay likening the residents of the town with vampires whose venom sucked anything interesting or genuine from a person. I did not fit within the grand picture of conformity and normalcy. I wanted to break out, to rip at its edges.
diff --git a/public/house-of-leaves-appendix-ii-e-the-three-attic-whalestoe-institute-letters-may-8th-1987/index.html b/public/house-of-leaves-appendix-ii-e-the-three-attic-whalestoe-institute-letters-may-8th-1987/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a949f87 --- /dev/null +++ b/public/house-of-leaves-appendix-ii-e-the-three-attic-whalestoe-institute-letters-may-8th-1987/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,196 @@ + + + + + + + + + ++ + cassie + + ink + +
+ + + + +House of Leaves: Appendix II-E, The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute Letters (May 8th, 1987)
+ + + + + + + +I’ve picked up House of Leaves again, Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel and veritable puzzle of a book. I previously abandoned it because, as a horror novel, I was having some trouble sleeping after reading it, but I’ve wanted to read it for years and the new year seems like a good time to conquer my fears.
+There’s plenty of discussion around the internet regarding the book, and plenty more people who, I’m sure, have decoded the book’s many coded messages. But I’m a stingy sort who likes to do things on my own, and I thought I’d log some of it here! The first of my challenges was a letter from Appendix II-E, sent to Johnny Truant from his mother; she suspects that the director of the Whalestoe Institute, where she is institutionalized, is intercepting her letters. She is able to send a private letter to Johnny via an attendant, telling him the key to her next letter: take only the first letter of each word, separate those letters into something coherent, and find her true message (the letter itself is pure nonsense). Therefore, it’s no significant discovery on my part, but more of a fun first challenge. Warning that this is a book of psychological horror, and the contents below may be troubling or triggering (esp. for rape victims).
+I won’t bother re-typing the entirety of the letter because, as I said, it’s nonsensical. However, when the first letter of each word is taken, I’ve come up with the following message.
+++May 8th, 1987
+Dearest Johnny,
+They have found a way to break me. Rape a fifty-six year old bag of bones. There is no worse and don’t believe otherwise.
+The attendants do it. Others do it. Not every day, not every week, maybe not even every month. But they do it. Someone I don’t know always comes. When it’s dark. Late. I’ve learned not to scream, screaming gave me hope and unanswered hope is shattered hope. Think of your Haitian. It is far saner to choose rape than shattered hope. So I submit and I drift.
+I let caprice and a certain degree of free association take me away. Sometimes I’m still away long after it’s done, after he’s gone — the stranger, the attendant, the custodian, the janitor, cleaning man, waiting man, dirty man — the night tidying up after him.
+I’m in hell giving into heaven where I sometimes think of your beautiful father with his dreamy wings and only then do I allow myself to cry. Not because your mother was raped (again) but because she loved so much what she could never have been allowed to keep. Such a silly girl.
+You must save me Johnny. In the name of your father. I must escape this place or I will die.
+I love you so much.
+You are all I have.
+P.
In addition, throughout the letter, letters are capitalized in the middle of words (ex. ‘froWned’). When those letters are collected, it spells the following message.
+++A face in a cloud no trace in the crowd
(This omits the MAN from “Man and Nam,” which have appeared between the o and w of ‘crowd.’ I have found no solution to their capitalization — yet?)
+The phrase felt familiar once I found it, so I googled it, despite my resolve to figure out the puzzles myself (if possible) — I received only results for House of Leaves — perhaps I read it on tumblr somewhere? — but Google confirmed my suspicion that the Whalestoe Letters contain plenty more secrets to uncover (I’ve not read past the May 8th letter yet). I look forward to unfolding them!
+Comments1
+Jennifer (2020-10-10):
+++THANK YOU for this.
Paul (2020-11-14):
+++5 years later and I say thank you.
Control (2021-07-26):
+++Appreciate the work, thank you
Shelby West (2021-08-02):
+++6 years later! Thanks, I got stuck on the word “Haitian.”
Tildy (2022-03-27):
+++Trying to decipher by bookd light at 3am was no good thank you from 2022
Hallway Explorer (2022-08-17):
+++Yes, thank you very much.
C (2023-05-24):
+++I’m dyslexic and trying SO hard to read this book, thank you, so much this was so hard for me and you saved me so much struggle!!
Laura5757 (2023-11-29):
+++While it’s not the same, the hidden message reminds me a lot of Ezra Pound’s famous poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” which consists of only two lines: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.” Perhaps that is what seemed familiar to you too?
Cassie (2024-07-02):
+++Perhaps! I do teach that poem to my students, so it occupies space in my brain…
Xynael (2024-08-07):
+++I also thought if its a key for a decipher code
+Since +FACE +RACE
+CLOUD +CROWD
+and +MAN +NAM
+do this +I’ve ready this in another Horror Books where they used these Einstein Codes to find hidden massages
+But I am really bad at these
+Maybe it’s nonesense and I see ghosts but maybe theres Something about it
+
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This post originally appeared when I ran my site on WordPress and allowed folks to comment. Most of these are just thank yous, but I wanted to preserve them all the same. ↩︎
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I’ve been podcasting on and off for over ten years now — all shows that I’ve since abandoned1, either intentionally or due to time — but I’ve kept websites for them up and running for archival purposes. Originally, the sites were powered by WordPress and podcasting plugins (PowerPress and then Podlove). I didn’t want to continue paying to host the sites nor maintain a WordPress install2. I could, of course, use one of the many podcast hosting services out there — but just like I believe in owning your own space on the internet, I believe you should own and control your podcast feed (and not have to pay a company $15/mo in perpetuity). I use Hugo (which I then deploy with Cloudflare Pages) to generate the sites and feeds; I chose because I understand how to use it. I’m sure you could make this work with other static site generators. There’s an 11ty plugin out there, for example, which is far more advanced than what I’ve set up. But I built this myself. It works. It does not require me to endlessly fiddle or update (unless I want to).
+I’ve been podcasting on and off for over ten years now — all shows that I’ve since abandoned1, either intentionally or due to time — but I’ve kept websites for them up and running for archival purposes. Originally, the sites were powered by WordPress and podcasting plugins (PowerPress and then Podlove). I didn’t want to continue paying to host the sites nor maintain a WordPress install2. I could, of course, use one of the many podcast hosting services out there — but just like I believe in owning your own space on the internet, I believe you should own and control your podcast feed (and not have to pay a company $15/mo in perpetuity). I use Hugo (which I then deploy with Cloudflare Pages) to generate the sites and feeds; I chose Hugo because I understand how to use it. I’m sure you could make this work with other static site generators. There’s an 11ty plugin out there, for example, which is far more advanced than what I’ve set up. But I built this myself. It works. It does not require me to endlessly fiddle or update (unless I want to).
I am not going to cover hosting your audio files in this post. I offload mine to a storage zone on Bunny; my podcasts are low traffic, so that costs me $12/yr. You could probably get away with using archive.org for free instead, as long as you can get a direct link to your mp3. I’m also not going to cover creating a theme for your podcast in this post. I made my own for both of my sites, but you can easily use a premade one.
A podcast is, at its core, a collection of audio files served by an RSS feed. That feed provides information to podcast apps, like where to download an episode and how long it is. An SSG like Hugo, which is designed primarily for bloggers, works great for this because it already has an an embedded RSS template that it uses to syndicate your content. The only difference is that we’re going to set up the RSS feed to serve both text (your show notes) and audio — as well as all the information that podcast apps need to surface your show. We’re going to work from Hugo’s RSS base template but inject basic podcast tags as well as some additional ones for newer features like chapter support.
Creating a custom feed template
diff --git a/public/i-finished-lord-of-the-rings/index.html b/public/i-finished-lord-of-the-rings/index.html index 716359f..451d26f 100644 --- a/public/i-finished-lord-of-the-rings/index.html +++ b/public/i-finished-lord-of-the-rings/index.html @@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ +Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring released in 2001 when I was seven years old. At the time, my media diet consisted mostly of The Powerpuff Girls and obsessively reading and re-reading the first four Harry Potter books.1 I would like to say that my father was thoughtful and felt that I would have enjoyed another fantasy series with wizards and magic but knew that a three-plus-hour theater experience was tall ask for a seven year old. Unfortunately, I know him, and I think it more likely that he is cheap and thought the movie looked cool, so when Fellowship released on home media, we trucked to the neighborhood knock-off and rented it on VHS. That night, I crowded with my two older siblings around a (by today’s standards) laughably small tube TV. We tucked in with no expectations or understanding of what the movie would be about.
I would like to say that I was surprised and delighted by the mystical adventure, high fantasy setting, and well-sketched characters. Instead I was terrified by the scant glimpses of Gollum and suffered the first sleepless night inspired by a movie I can recall.2 I doubt I understood much of the plot: the only impressions I can recall are “swords and magic are cool” and “maybe Dad should be screening these movies before he shows them to us.”3
Lord of the Rings-mania, of course, consumed the early 2000s, and I became ever-so-slightly less of a chickenshit. My siblings and I were obsessed with the films; we watched them repeatedly and anxiously awaited each release. I don’t remember seeing Two Towers for the first time (though the scene of Aragorn opening the doors to Helms Deep is etched in my brain as a core memory), but we did see Return of the King in theaters. I also spent a sleepless night after it, but my insomnia stemmed instead from violent puking fits of popcorn and Sierra Mist.4
diff --git a/public/index.html b/public/index.html index 84bae19..b48de03 100644 --- a/public/index.html +++ b/public/index.html @@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ +(week notes 28)
+(week notes 029)
Doing
Reading
Watching
Playing
+I’m still playing Fields of Mistria, although I have had a few mid-day game crashes this week. The game is in early access, so I can’t complain too much, but it’s the first time it’s happened to me. It’s frustrating to lose progress, but I suppose I should get into the habit of saving a few times throughout the day.1
Listening
-I finally got around to listening to SOPHIE by SOPHIE. Man, I have such mixed feelings about posthumous releases. The greedy bitch in me wants more, always, especially from artists who died way too young. I know SOPHIE’s brother, who finished the album, insists that SOPHIE was nearly done with it at the time of her death, but the stretch between “nearly finished” and “actually ready to release” can be miles long for an artist. I’m not an artist, by any means, of SOPHIE’s caliber, but a piece of writing for me can completely transform in the edit. Posthumous albums too often feel like an early sketch1, a pastiche of the auteur that are perhaps categorically incapable of capturing the genuine vision and artistry of the deceased. Unfortunately, this was the case for me with SOPHIE: “Reason Why” and “Live in My Truth” were standouts, but in general, it lacked the thrill and voice of SOPHIE (RIP).
+I listened to SUCK UP ALL THE OXYGEN by Hutch Harris because I saw the cover on Bandcamp and thought it was funny. The album was fine but not for me. There was a time in my life when I probably would have been really into this, but it’s not now.
+Reduced to tongue eardrum thumb pencil and price (WN28)
+ +Doing
+My desk upgrade journey hasn’t gone as planned. The monitor mount I bought has a really small clamp, which I should have checked before buying it, but I was so excited about a good deal. It fits on the desk and looks great, but I’m not able to spread the weight with the steel plates I bought, and I don’t trust a particleboard desktop to stand the test of time with a clamp. I spent a long time trying to brainstorm solutions (modify the clamp? build a wooden desk top?), and I had a sleepless night stressed about it. Eventually I decided to just order a different mount and I’ll try to sell this one locally to get my money back. It’s a bummer because the arm is really nice, but I wanted the piece of mind of using something that isn’t jerry-rigged. Normally I’m down for a stupid solution, but not when it’s holding up several hundreds of dollars of tech.
Using Hugo to generate a podcast feed
-I’ve been podcasting on and off for over ten years now — all shows that I’ve since abandoned1, either intentionally or due to time — but I’ve kept websites for them up and running for archival purposes. Originally, the sites were powered by WordPress and podcasting plugins (PowerPress and then Podlove). I didn’t want to continue paying to host the sites nor maintain a WordPress install2, so here’s how I migrated the sites to Hugo (which I then deploy with Cloudflare Pages).
+I’ve been podcasting on and off for over ten years now — all shows that I’ve since abandoned1, either intentionally or due to time — but I’ve kept websites for them up and running for archival purposes. Originally, the sites were powered by WordPress and podcasting plugins (PowerPress and then Podlove). I didn’t want to continue paying to host the sites nor maintain a WordPress install2. I could, of course, use one of the many podcast hosting services out there — but just like I believe in owning your own space on the internet, I believe you should own and control your podcast feed (and not have to pay a company $15/mo in perpetuity). I use Hugo (which I then deploy with Cloudflare Pages) to generate the sites and feeds; I chose Hugo because I understand how to use it. I’m sure you could make this work with other static site generators. There’s an 11ty plugin out there, for example, which is far more advanced than what I’ve set up. But I built this myself. It works. It does not require me to endlessly fiddle or update (unless I want to).
- - -i'm falling down with shit caked on my shoes (week notes 25)
- -Doing
-Joe and I visited some of his family with a lake house this week where my farmer’s tan became more and more pronounced. I also “worked” two days this week: I had committee meetings on Thursday and then a joint meeting to coordinate middle school/high school/college GSAs in my area. I also went to a concert (more about that in the music section) with a friend who moved away a year ago and who I missed a lot!
-A friend of mine is a big fan of Florence + the Machine. I confessed to only really knowing (but liking) her hits, “Dog Days” and “Cosmic Love.” I asked which album she would recommend I listen to; she said How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (2015),1 and I texted her about some of the songs on it. She asked if I was listening to the whole thing given the back to back messages; I said yes, and I started to consider how I like to consume music.
We live in a shuffled playlist and artist mix culture.2 We collect our favorite tracks or let an algorithm serve us up suggestions of “you might like” or “this label paid for this to be fed to the masses.” I do it, too; much of my music listening is done passively, as a backdrop to other tasks that aren’t consuming my entire mental energy like driving or cleaning or unpacking (i.e. non-diegetic video game style background noise meant to go mostly unnoticed).
TikTok is the ultimate bastardization of music listening3, as songs are reduced down to ten-second snippets replayed devoid of any context. Forget the entire album – you’re missing even just the song.
diff --git a/public/js/main.js.map b/public/js/main.js.map index bee2152..d74de90 100644 --- a/public/js/main.js.map +++ b/public/js/main.js.map @@ -1 +1 @@ -{"version":3,"sources":["file:///F:/websites/cassiedotink/themes/neverhungoveragain/assets/js/main.js"],"sourcesContent":["console.log('This site was generated by Hugo.');\r\n"],"mappings":";;AAAA,UAAQ,IAAI,kCAAkC;","names":[]} \ No newline at end of file +{"version":3,"sources":["file:///F:/Websites/cassiedotink/themes/neverhungoveragain/assets/js/main.js"],"sourcesContent":["console.log('This site was generated by Hugo.');\r\n"],"mappings":";;AAAA,UAAQ,IAAI,kCAAkC;","names":[]} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/public/litr-250-close-reading-2e/index.html b/public/litr-250-close-reading-2e/index.html index 0a8fb32..a133eb8 100644 --- a/public/litr-250-close-reading-2e/index.html +++ b/public/litr-250-close-reading-2e/index.html @@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ +In the beginning of Chapter VIII in the third section of To the Lighthouse, pages 186-187, Virginia Woolf’s unique approach to perspective and introspection create a subjective presentation of reality and relationships, supported by extended metaphors of fluidity and stillness. On a boat trip mandated by Mr. Ramsay to the titular lighthouse, Cam and James anatomize and unfold their feelings towards their father. Cam evolves as the boat moves across the sea while James’s unflinching rage and violence towards the patriarch repeat in this section as the sailboat halts and space contracts to exacerbate his indignation. Woolf thus frames and explores the figure of Mr. Ramsay and the nominal motif of a journey through individual introspection and excurses. 1
The selection picks up directly from the end of Chapter IV, shifting away from an interlude wherein Lily Briscoe works on her painting and contemplates her own relationships to both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, the former present in the scene with Cam and James, the latter casting a long shadow over it – James’s hatred of Mr. Ramsay was first introduced in an Oedipal fashion in the novel’s very first chapter, where James sees Mr. Ramsay as basking in “the pleasure of disillusioning his son… [and] ridicul[ing] his wife,” and James perceives his mother as “ten times better in every way than” her husband (Woolf 8). Woolf seemingly disregards flow and a coherent progression of events by bisecting the boat journey with Lily’s artistic journey; her prose instead acts more as combined snapshots from various perspectives about fraught, inscrutable figures like Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. The boat trip is merely a device through which Woolf can open “the picture into the depths of consciousness,” i.e. James and Cam’s internal reflections about their father (Auerbach 540).
While Cam and James were at first united in their mission to “fight tyranny to the death” during the trip to the lighthouse, tyranny being Mr. Ramsay, Cam softens on her father toward the end of Chapter IV (Woolf 167). It is no accident, then, that Chapter VIII opens with the boat still in motion and from Cam’s perspective – the movement of the boat frames the characters’ parenthetical thoughts. Cam contemplates the “green swirls and… patterns” made by her hand in the water and imagines an “underworld of waters” where “in the green light a change came over one’s entire mind” (Woolf 186). These images of fluidity and change reflect the previous excurses into Cam’s subjective reality – her thawing resistance to her father. However, when the wind suddenly calms and the boat stops moving, James stews in the same thoughts that have gripped him throughout the novel (his antipathy for his father), a kind of stillness of thought and emotion.
diff --git a/public/media-log-2024-01/index.html b/public/media-log-2024-01/index.html index 74cbdea..c0506f2 100644 --- a/public/media-log-2024-01/index.html +++ b/public/media-log-2024-01/index.html @@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ +TV
- One Tree Hill, season six and seven - I’ve been marathoning One Tree Hill on a friend’s recommendation. By this season, we are well passed the “good” seasons, but it’s still entertaining enough to watch — if only to count how many more car crashes the writers will introduce as plot lines. I think the early (1-4) seasons are a decent watch, but at this point, I’m really just seeing it through to the end. Season seven has a novelty in seeing how a show pivots after losing its main character. I don’t think OTH did so gracefully; they elevated some, generously, background characters into the main act and lumped on bunch of new ones at that. Some work better than others, but at least I’m almost at the end. diff --git a/public/media-log-august-2023/index.html b/public/media-log-august-2023/index.html index 684c2e2..82f5b86 100644 --- a/public/media-log-august-2023/index.html +++ b/public/media-log-august-2023/index.html @@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ +
- Barbie - I was underwhelmed. There’s been lots of chatter, and I loved Lady Bird, but Barbie didn’t hit for me; too much Ken (to be the hundredth person to whine about it) and the ending felt unearned and thematically confused. This was more of an homage to Barbie as a product than it was an homage to womanhood, but it pretended to be the latter. diff --git a/public/media-log-july-2023/index.html b/public/media-log-july-2023/index.html index 79e5439..135519b 100644 --- a/public/media-log-july-2023/index.html +++ b/public/media-log-july-2023/index.html @@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ +
Movies
Part of my resolution to blog more is to start a media consumption log for the year where I record what I’m reading, watching, and listening to. I’m going to do it monthly; expect a finalized list on the last day of each month (possibly backdated).
Movies
-
diff --git a/public/moving-my-home-server-to-a-new-chassis/index.html b/public/moving-my-home-server-to-a-new-chassis/index.html
index 1e19497..dce1aa4 100644
--- a/public/moving-my-home-server-to-a-new-chassis/index.html
+++ b/public/moving-my-home-server-to-a-new-chassis/index.html
@@ -7,6 +7,7 @@
+
I have a home server (running Unraid) that I use to backup computers, as media storage, and to run various apps. It’s mostly been cobbled together from used parts I found for cheap, and it generally followed Serverbuild’s NAS Killer 4 guide. It runs like a dream, and putting it together is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. More recently, with streaming sites like Netflix, Hulu, etc. cracking down on password sharing, it has become my pathway to shedding some monthly subscriptions and owning my own media.
For years, that server has lived in an old NZXT case that I had used when I built my first PC, primarily because I had the case laying around and because it still had bays for 3.5" drives (most modern PC cases only include one or two and instead provide storage for 2.5" drives). That bulky case has been shoved away in whatever corner of my apartments I could find, but now that I own a house, I have dreams of setting up a proper server rack in a closet somewhere. My home’s basement has a strange little room that housed only the oil tank and is conveniently right below my office space, so that’s the intended home. We replaced and relocated the tank and ran electrical to it, so it’s now good to go.
I purchased a rack mount case (Rosewill RSV-L4500U) off of the hardwareswap Discord not too long ago and intended to move the server when I had some free time. Just a few days ago, I found that one of my 6TB drives was throwing errors in Unraid. I ran a SMART test, which seemed to clear, so I thought I would start by checking the physical connections — and if I was going to have to take the server down, I might as well move it into the new case.
diff --git a/public/moving-to-a-rack-mount-setup/index.html b/public/moving-to-a-rack-mount-setup/index.html index eb0431c..75f17e5 100644 --- a/public/moving-to-a-rack-mount-setup/index.html +++ b/public/moving-to-a-rack-mount-setup/index.html @@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ +I wrote a post a few months ago cataloguing moving my home server from the old NZXT case I had leftover from my old PC into a Rosewill chassis that would let me, eventually, move to a proper rack setup. This past Prime Day, I purchased a Riveco 15U rack and then some sliding rails to go along with it, with the hope of finally moving the loud and hot NAS into the basement where it belongs.
Putting together the rack was easy enough: there were a lot of screws, which is fine, but the assembly was straightforward.
I’m not a New Years Resolution person; listening to a lot of “My Year in Lists” by Los Campesinos! as a teen made me quite cynical about the whole thing.
However, I am a very goal-oriented, reflective person. In late 2022, after years of gaining weight and developing some really negative patterns of self-talk around my body image, I decided to join a gym. Of course I’d like to see the number on the scale go down, but the main goal was just to get healthier and develop healthier habits. I started running, because that’s what I used to do (not well), and eventually convinced a friend to join with me. Together, we set the goal of running a 5K, and we did our first in May of 2023, in about 41 minutes (in our defense, it was an extremely hilly course, but also progress, progress1). We ran three more as the year went by; my most recent was November, where I finished in around 36 minutes.
I’m still not happy with the number on the scale, but I’m also trying not to focus on it too much.
diff --git a/public/old-woman-yells-at-the-cloud/index.html b/public/old-woman-yells-at-the-cloud/index.html index 71deb95..084e620 100644 --- a/public/old-woman-yells-at-the-cloud/index.html +++ b/public/old-woman-yells-at-the-cloud/index.html @@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ +I recently listened to an episode of Never Been a Better Podcast in which Austin Walker, referencing a Twitter thread by @v21, posited that we are moving into a new era of the internet where content is generated by machines rather than people; where once the internet was used by people to access large bodies of information and to connect with other people, we now use it to connect with machines that regurgitate photocopies of photocopies of information.
The transformation of the internet from a database of (somewhat) reliable information into a long game of telephone is troubling; as they discuss on that same podcast, no video game walkthrough site that ranks at the top of Google today is ever more reliable than the GameFAQs txt files filled with ASCII art that were painstakingly written by fourteen year olds, peer reviewed, and continuously revised.
That is all true, and it is worth discussing and writing about. But I am thinking about the point of connection. I often feel that we have lost the human connection found on the internet of old.
diff --git a/public/on-teaching/index.html b/public/on-teaching/index.html index c28f487..c9c2d85 100644 --- a/public/on-teaching/index.html +++ b/public/on-teaching/index.html @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ When I was a kid, I was always interested in teaching; my grandparents had an unfinished basement that, for some reason, had a little chalkboard and table. My siblings and I would play school down there, and I loved to play the role of teacher – despite being considerably younger than them.1 I loved school, too. I loved most every subject (especially grammar – I’m one of the few children who absolutely rejoiced when asked to take out my grammar workbook) and was, at the risk of conceit, good at academics. I also read voraciously in elementary school. "> +This September marks the start of my fourth year teaching.
When I was a kid, I was always interested in teaching; my grandparents had an unfinished basement that, for some reason, had a little chalkboard and table. My siblings and I would play school down there, and I loved to play the role of teacher – despite being considerably younger than them.1 I loved school, too. I loved most every subject (especially grammar – I’m one of the few children who absolutely rejoiced when asked to take out my grammar workbook) and was, at the risk of conceit, good at academics. I also read voraciously in elementary school.
When I was in the seventh grade, I became somewhat disillusioned with English class. It entertains my students when I tell them that I absolutely hated seventh grade English, and I attribute this largely to my teacher. I don’t think she was incompetent, but she was uninspired in her approach. The texts we read were dreadful (The Cay and The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, I am convinced, will turn any child against the field of English literature wholesale), which I know may have been beyond her control, and it was one of the first times in my schooling that I struggled to grasp concepts, namely sentence types and who/whom.2
diff --git a/public/posts/index.html b/public/posts/index.html index be54d35..0e10831 100644 --- a/public/posts/index.html +++ b/public/posts/index.html @@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ +Using Hugo to generate a podcast feed
-I’ve been podcasting on and off for over ten years now — all shows that I’ve since abandoned1, either intentionally or due to time — but I’ve kept websites for them up and running for archival purposes. Originally, the sites were powered by WordPress and podcasting plugins (PowerPress and then Podlove). I didn’t want to continue paying to host the sites nor maintain a WordPress install2, so here’s how I migrated the sites to Hugo. I’m not going to cover hosting your media files or creating a theme for your podcast website in this post, but maybe I’ll do another write up in the future on those topics.
+I’ve been podcasting on and off for over ten years now — all shows that I’ve since abandoned1, either intentionally or due to time — but I’ve kept websites for them up and running for archival purposes. Originally, the sites were powered by WordPress and podcasting plugins (PowerPress and then Podlove). I didn’t want to continue paying to host the sites nor maintain a WordPress install2. I could, of course, use one of the many podcast hosting services out there — but just like I believe in owning your own space on the internet, I believe you should own and control your podcast feed (and not have to pay a company $15/mo in perpetuity). I use Hugo (which I then deploy with Cloudflare Pages) to generate the sites and feeds; I chose Hugo because I understand how to use it. I’m sure you could make this work with other static site generators. There’s an 11ty plugin out there, for example, which is far more advanced than what I’ve set up. But I built this myself. It works. It does not require me to endlessly fiddle or update (unless I want to).
+2016 was the first year I was eligible to vote in a presidential election. I was away at college, so I completed an absentee ballot, and, like most, felt confident in what I thought would be the result. I was no big fan of Clinton’s — I voted for Bernie in the primaries — but the other option was laughable: I couldn’t believe that a major political party put such a clown up as their candidate, and I thought the electorate was smart enough to see him for the fraud (and fascist) he was.
On the night of Tuesday, November 8th, I had a Diversity in Education class at 5:30pm. I enjoyed the class; it was mostly discussion-based, encouraging future educators to consider how they might be more inclusive and equitable in their practices. The curriculum was not as aggressive as I might have liked — I had cut my teeth as a teen on leftist circles of tumblr, so by comparison, the concept of considering diversity beyond celebrating and recognizing Black History Month was pretty banal. Even so, I was glad to be in a room with (mostly) like-minded people eager to make kids feel seen and hard.
The class was held in my college’s education building, which was built partially into a hill. The front of the building is a stunning wall of open windows that frame the mountain-facing campus. At the rear of the building, where my class met, we had no windows — and, critically, no cell reception.
diff --git a/public/sitemap.xml b/public/sitemap.xml index 3eb3070..0adf5b1 100644 --- a/public/sitemap.xml +++ b/public/sitemap.xml @@ -2,32 +2,35 @@diff --git a/public/stages-of-moving/index.html b/public/stages-of-moving/index.html index 8d5dfb6..8d4a20a 100644 --- a/public/stages-of-moving/index.html +++ b/public/stages-of-moving/index.html @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ Stage 2: Coping / Bargaining Okay, there is actually a lot to do, but it’s not so bad. I can just drop everything in the garage and focus on cleaning the apartment. "> +Write a blog post about words of wisdom your younger self would have appreciated hearing. (via blogprompts)1
Stage 1: Denial & Naivety
I don’t have that much stuff. I don’t think packing is going to be that hard this time. I’ve already boxed up my books – how much more could I need to do?