2022.11.30: “I’m back …”

“I’ve been too long, I’m glad to be back
Yes, I’m let loose from the noose
That’s kept me hanging about”
— Young, Young & Johnson

To misquote another work that needs no introduction:

“Alas, forty-eight years is far too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable netizens. I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

To summarize:

  • I began griping online in a bloggish way May 7, 1998.
  • In December of 2000 I began posting at K5 and in 2002 and 2004 I began posting at two other Scoop-based sites.
  • Meanwhile, from November of 2003 until May of 2007 I kept another blog with a simple, home-grown comment system that I have long since purged of database content.
  • For a while after I returned from Berlin I used MySpace for diary-like entries, and these have been merged into a WordPress system that I used from June of 2010 until April of 2013.
  • Along the way a few other miscellaneous entries were written, and on one of the Scoop-based systems I continued posting somewhat consistently until 2013, when I moved to Rochester. Since then I wrote one 2019 entry (occasioned by the birth of $SPARE), another in 2020, and even one in 2021.
  • Across several systems, servers, and decades I have a thousand or so posts, but almost nothing in the past ten years.

It is too strong a statement to claim that my move to Rochester killed any creativity or creative output that I had (after all, I did continue writing in a Sunday writing group until birth of the $HEIR), but there is a significant overlap between my move to working in IT and me giving up writing, literature, and the like. After a too-long break I decided a birthday was occasion enough to begin posting again, even if it’s on a system I plan to keep temporary …

This whole brief post is too annoyingly meta even for my own taste(s), but to continue but also shift a bit:

  1. This renewed project begins November 30, 2022
  2. For now I’ll post under the Homo Aestheticus blog name, hosted on WordPress
  3. I strongly believe that Cool URIs don’t change, but …
  4. … my overarching disdain for WordPress and PHP in general, along for my desire to curate everything under one roof, so to speak, will lead me to rearranging/renaming URIs/URLs.
  5. And I hope to move to more of a static site generator and write in either reStructuredText or AsciiDoc (after all, Markdown is bad for you).
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Tone-deaf dining

John Winterman, maitre d’ at Daniel restaurant in New York City, gives us “Eat This List: 5 reasons you (yes you) should embrace fine dining“.

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Cultural Surrogate:

Tim Kreider:

Unalloyed honesty is the iridium of the information economy — vanishingly rare, and therefore precious. We don’t respect people like Louis C.K. or George Saunders because of their credentials; it’s because they’re among the few people in public life who’ll say anything obviously true — or, at the very least, anything they really mean. We trust that, unlike politicians or their spin doctors, corporate flacks, think-tank flunkies or cable propagandists, they have no agenda beyond the self-evident one of making a living with their work.

In other words, they are jesters. Fools.

And that is not a bad thing.

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I Can’t Believe it’s not Pudding, or: Adventures in Bad Food Ideas

Let’s say you have several cupboards. One such cupboard hides cannisters of forgotten, rarely-if-ever-used Coffee-mate brand powedered non-dairy creamer, a non-food foodstuff. Let’s further suppose that instead of just throwing said cannisters in the garbage, you wonder what one could do with such items. In a culinary way.

Could one, perhaps, make pudding?

Why not give it a try!

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King of the Hill, or: About as Stealthy as ‘Alulcard’ and ‘Dr. Acula’

The A.V. Club has:

I’ve been meaning to read “Locke & Key” for ages; perhaps this will provide the impetus.

See also:

What I find most interesting from the A.V. Club interview? Being able to contextualize Hill in how he references Whedon, Brian K. Vaughan, and others. We see him as a writer aware of his pop culture peers and who can use them as touchstones for techniques and perspectives.

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2013.04.27: TV Thoughts

By numerical date it’s the two-year anniversary of The Tornado; by day, though, that will always be a Wednesday. It’s not the same if you’re not huddled in the basement of BB Comer as the power and internet and phones go out while from above you hear what sounds like the Hoover to end all Hoovers vacuuming the stadium.

Today it rained the tiniest bit and we had that golden summer post-rain glow as afternoon slid into an evening gown. We watched the newest ‘Doctor Who’, and got back on track with ‘Millennium’ and ‘The X-Files’. We’re still waiting for the storm the weather apps are promising.

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“We should be more like …” [Grimes]

Salon has a post (“I don’t want to have to compromise my morals in order to make a living”) about/by the musician/artist Grimes.

It’s a name I’d heard before …

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“We should be more like …” [Jin Jeong]

Who is Jin? She describes herself as “a young South Korean female” and that she “wanted to hitchhike and see the universe. But I changed my mind and decided first to see more of this world.” Why is she relevant, what is she doing? Beginning in September, 2011, she’s biking around the world.

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[XF/M] S3E12 & S6E12: “The Sound of Snow” and “One Son”

M: Love and hate here.

XF: Ms. S did not see that coming.

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[XF/M] S3E11 & S6E11: “Collateral” and “Two Fathers”

Tuesday evening we returned to our rotation.

First: John Locke, Spike, and Art Bell in one episode … I can’t take credit for that way of looking at it, though, as it’s part of the A.V. Club review.

Then: over in ‘The X-Files’ we get the first of a two-parter, “Two Fathers”, in which we begin to wrap up the entire mythology arc. It’s more of a punt than anything, but it’s still hugely entertaining.

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