Messages now offers me suggested replies that I can send with a click to save myself the hassle of saying something on my own. But why text with someone you can’t be bothered to text with? It’s a weird concept. (Same thing in Teams, email, etc. … it says something damning about work culture that these options seem useful to so many people in that context.)

I tend to make things fa

That moment when, deep in a pile of grading, you have to look at the novel’s cover to check that the title is in fact what you always knew it was ... because students keep calling it something else. What are they thinking?

If this was what I’d seen looking out the window on Tuesday, it would have been an omen. Alas (fortunately?), it was Friday. This storm was just a storm.

I’m reminded of Deadwood, and finding an odd kind of solace there. “Going wrong is not the end of fucking things, Johnny.” —Dan, Deadwood

I’m not a doomsayer, but I do worry because so much of online life is a disease, eating away at people’s ability to see, to understand and to think about the world. Our schools aren’t helping. Most make it worse.

I've approached this election with dread, which makes it seem like I'd be steeled for tonight, but I'm not. Instead I'm struggling through memories of 2016. I lack the cookies I need to stress eat through the next few hours. The insane disconnect between my feelings (dread) and my response (eating) is the message.

That moment when, after you've been working like mad for weeks, but you clear some deadlines, have some breathing room, and sit down and close your eyes for a minute, take a breath. And then another. And suddenly it feels like you could sit there for days, because: so tired.

Autumn says good morning in...

It has been a fucking week. Nothing to say about it here. Just marking the fact for future reference.

The Beav, looping through 20th cent

Fall has come for the river.

After all these years, I’m still shocked by Tinderbox’s export. You have to learn it and that means learning a bit of HTML and CSS, but once you have, you can do impossibly magical things. I mean this last literally: what I accomplish with export seems like magic because I wouldn’t even know where to start if I wanted to do the same work using any of the other tools I know. This blog is an impossibility that exits because of Tinderbox export.

I just realized that my RSS agent is set up to syndicate posts, not micro-posts. My first instinct was to see this as a problem that needed to be fixed, but then, when I went to change it, I realized that this is actually a nice feature. If anyone beyond the Black Wall is listening in, an RSS that filters out my daily chatter is probably better than one that doesn’t. This non-problem gives me a useful model for how to offer more than one RSS feed as well. Something for later maybe.

When I get a minute I may write about not writing a book I’d agreed to write. (It’ll take more than a minute.) I think it’d do me good, but do I have the guts to do it? Not sure I do. Not sure at all.

I’ve had the good fortune of finding a way to do things I enjoy as part of my job, but I know some people suggest mixing the two is unrealistic, perhaps even problematic, that it’s better to keep personal interests personal and to wall work off at work. At school, colleagues especially warn against teaching the books you love. I see a risk in the mixture, but it isn’t about “losing balance” or wearing out my pleasure by weaving it into my job. The danger I see is that work habits carry over to playtime and that I begin treating enjoyments as activities to be organized, made efficient or judged in terms of outputs. Work made play is good. Play made work is not. Serious, leisurely play that bleeds into and remakes work is my ideal.

Sorting out micro-posts proved even trickier than I thought. Eventually tracked down the problem: it had to do with the query for the agent building my index page. Automation is magical. It’s also, by nature, out of hand and thus out of mind. I lean manual.

Fall’s come for the mountain.

Mini-Doc on a French Pastel Maker