Fond wishes on International Women’s Day to all the marvelous women in my life. Whether related by blood or by choice, whether near or far, whether AFAB or not, whether you feel like a woman every day or only some, and however you express yourself. I’m glad we know each other.
Personal
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
Book twenty-two of 2019: Farmer in the Sky, by Robert Heinlein. ⭐️⭐️ 1951 Retro Hugo Best Novel 📚
A Boy Scout moves to Jupiter’s moon Ganymede to homestead and start a farm from scratch. Mildly interesting for the early ideas around terraforming and colonization. Meh.
Book twenty-one of 2019: Second Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 📚
Asimov himself notes this in an introductory essay, but his ability to craft engaging SF of ideas and conversations over three books (eight stories) with little to no “on stage” action is remarkable.
Well, now I know who to blame for my dreary fashion sense: Beau Brummell (well, and discovering the goth community in my youth….).
I break out of the drab-ness occasionally (my Pride kilt from Verillas, for example), but…yeah. Maybe I could do more. Need to ruminate on this.
Website (not blogging) Ennui
I’m not really happy with my website — I’m tired of WordPress, and ‘view source’ just makes me cringe at all the junk, cruft, and JavaScript bogging down what could and should be relatively simple, clean, HTML/CSS — but I don’t know how to reinvigorate it in a way I like.
I don’t want to entirely stop blogging, nor do I want to lose all the stuff that’s here already, or break existing URLs.
I’ve been looking into various flat-file or static CMS backends, and though grav is the one that most caught my eye, it (as far as I can tell) would mean losing the ability to post through micro.blog or any other third-party app that uses the MetaWeblog API, which would make spur-of-the-moment posts more difficult.
Even if I did resign myself to only adding posts through the admin UI (or by FTPing in to manually build the folder/file structure that grav uses), if I figured out how to import all my past entries from WordPress (this might do it), I haven’t been able to find a way to tweak the URL structure, which means I’d probably have to figure out how to generate a huge .htaccess file to handle the 5,170 or so redirects so I didn’t break any existing URLs. I may not get linked to a lot, but it happens occasionally, and I’d prefer not to 404 those.
(Plus, as I was playing with grav, I kept getting blank screens where I should have been getting post entry or edit screens, which…well, not sure if that’s a grav issue, a Safari browser issue, or some other issue, but it didn’t bode well.)
Other backends either looked too complex for my current needs/skills/available time (I just don’t have the time or impetus to try to learn Jekyll, which kept popping up), or didn’t fully support Markdown at all or enough, or had one or another thing that made them feel “not right” for me.
Really, what I’d kind of like to do is go back to hand-coding my site, so I have full control over the HTML/CSS (even if it looks like crap, it’ll look like my crap…so to speak), only to still be able to blog easily using micro.blog or Ulysses or other such tools. Not sure that’s really a possibility, though.
In the end, this isn’t much more than a bit of whinging and trying to figure out what exactly I’m looking for. But if anyone actually 1) reads this, and 2) has a magical solution for all my woes, I’d be happy to hear it!
Book twenty of 2019: Foundation and Empire, by Isaac Asimov. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1946 Retro Hugo Best Novel (for The Mule, part two of this book) 📚
Very much enjoying finally reading these (and surprised that it seems I never had, or had done so so long ago that I’d forgotten).
Book nineteen of 2019: Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 📚
Though I’m a big fan of Asimov’s short fiction, I don’t think I’d actually read this series, and I’m happy to see that (for the most part) Asimov’s writing doesn’t suffer as much as other works from this era do.
Book eighteen of 2019: The Patrian Transgression, by Simon Hawke. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ 📚
(Trek novels are my “fluffy comfort food” reading. With few exceptions, I enjoy them all, good and bad, so even mini-reviews are somewhat pointless. You understand, I’m sure. LLAP 🖖)
Book seventeen of 2019: Beyond This Horizon, by Robert A. Heinlein. ⭐️⭐️ 1943 Retro Hugo Best Novel. 📚
As an exploration of boredom in a utopia and the possibilities of genetic engineering, it’s mildly interesting, but felt unfocused, oddly structured, and kind of tedious.
Happy Valentine’s Day (or not, if you prefer)!
A happy Valentine’s Day to all of you who are celebrating with spouses, partners, significant others, metamours, paramours, lovers, friends with benefits, playmates, platonic loves, or any other applicable person, persons, or combinations of the above.
And for those of you who for whatever reason don’t celebrate this day, I hope you have a good day as well, and survive the onslaught of shmoopyness throughout the day!