Middle of the week, middle of the month, beginning of the year. Life continues apace, into sub-zero temperatures and the quickening darkness of thinly lit days. And yet, the blanket of white reflects the light into a landscape of glow and twinkle. Cold, and grey above, and white below, and deliberate in existence. As goes the Winter, so will come the Spring, one step at a time, one day after the other. A pacing march into March, and the year beyond.
Inputs
1: Speaking of Winter, Kottke links off to some wonderful photography of oddly frozen time and matter, and the ways that the slowing and stopping lead to the ephemeral trapped, paused, caught mid dance in the interstitials. It reminds me in a way of the in-between frames in cartoons or animations. Animators draw key-frames, that show the important moments of movement they’re looking to show, but to get from one to another, 12-24 frames per second must be generated. The frames between often look nothing like one would expect, with blurs of movement that the mind’s eye interprets as natural movement, our brains filling the gutters of space between still images, creating movement from flickers of color and light.
2: The latest edition of Felicia Day’s newsletter goes into her personal experience with something I think all of us struggle with: the difficulty of being beholden to gatekeepers who decide our fates outside our influence or ability to control. She’s fought this through owning her own means of production, which I think is probably the right impulse these days, especially with the commodification of avenues of publishing, though it does also tend to limit the scope and scale of such things.
This also jives with recent angling I’ve seen about a return to niche or bespoke online presences, away from massive platforms that sand down the rough edges and calculate for a middle that doesn’t feel like it actually addresses any middle of the curve we’re on. Long tails everywhere again.
3: Iowa caucuses happened. It went about as expected, but I think it’s important to remember that caucuses in general aren’t incredibly inclusive by nature of how they’re run in a modern world, and that, as a total of those eligible to participate in them, under 15% of those actually did. Let’s not take any sort of enduring lesson from the 53,000 assholes in Iowa fervent enough and well-positioned enough to come out in a snow storm and line up behind a fascist insurgency.
Projects In Progress
Made a server fire up on the localhost. So that’s something.