Category: Daily Journal

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.

The Christmas tree was escorted to the curb today, the lingering scent of pine slowly dissipating from my living room. It’s the final shred of acceptance for me of the closing of the season. Christmas these last years has been hard, with all of the loss compounding that feeling of growing up and growing more and more alone. And yet, we continue ever forward, through the approaching year, aimed forward, with another Christmas at its end. We’ve got 344 days to Christmas. Ho ho ho.

Inputs

1: WOOOOOO!!!! Big win out of the Buccaneers, looking the better team in all three phases. Tackled harder, and as a team. Broke through tackles that the Eagles didn’t seem to have the fortitude (or, towards the conclusion, the heart) to make. Even a solid kicking performance!

Overall, a big effort out of the team, repeatedly demonstrating a superior will to win. And now, on to Detroit, in a matchup that would have seemed bizarre for most of the last 30 years. Two long-maligned underdog franchises face off for the right to participate in the NFC Championship game. 2024, continuing to be wild.

2: The big story of the day on social media is this one (NYTimes Gift Article), regarding the use of courtesy cards by people to get out of traffic tickets in New York, and the insane amount of pressure being put on one officer not to go along blindly with an obviously corrupt system of patronage. The whole thing is gobsmacking, but this quote stood out:

“Quotas are officially barred, but Bianchi said he was required to issue six tickets daily.”

Just another example of unofficial official rules that drives me absolutely insane (and something we all suspect to be true, even through the vehement denials such a construction allows for). For an organization ostensibly created to enforce the law (though which it is clear has a different remit entirely), rules that aren’t rules but are enforced with the weight of them is a practice that symbolizes the inherent struggle to exist and to know what is expected vs what is right.

Oh, and the kicker: “Bianchi stopped one teenager about a dozen times; he got so familiar with the family that the kid’s father began sending him holiday greetings. (The kid is now a police officer.)” FFS.

3: Via 404 Media, “Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find,” which, duh. However! The author goes in depth on a study done in Germany on overall search quality across search engines, including Google’s and finds overall that results at the top-end of search queries are more stuffed with nonsense than before, including this insight: “(W)e find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do.” Meaning, though the rest of the web is rather normally distributed with affiliate marketers, those reliant on the practice are gaming their way regularly to the top of results, polluting those being shown to organic searchers.

The gaming of search results and “Search Engine Optimization” as a field of study and business have been an issue since the advent of PageRank displaced Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and the dozen other purely collative search engines. As an arms race, consumers are losing, to the point that paid subscription search is beginning to be a viable business model to replace what had been the commoditized compliment of serving ads. Entropy, as always.

Projects In Progress

🤷‍♂️

I went on about it on BlueSky, but one thing I’ve started to get irked by is the complaint from authors of clickbaity articles online that they are not responsible for the titles of the posts their words appear below. While I’m certain that’s true, it’s your name on the thing. If you want someone else to be held to account, point at them, and let them hold specific accountability for their remonstrable actions. Otherwise, your name’s on it, bud. If you don’t agree with it, make that clear and take an actual stand, and not a soft shrug that wants the benefit of the traffic without the blame. Ya can’t have it both ways.

Inputs

1: By the time this publishes, it won’t have happened yet, but I’ll be watching the Buccaneers hosting the Philadelphia Eagles down in Tampa. Do I hold out much hope at their winning? No, no I do not. However! Being a fan is being, by definition, unreasonably supportive of an organization that couldn’t care less about your existence as anything but a paying body, bolstering their bottom line. Fandom continues apace. Go Bucs!

2: I live in Wisconsin, where the entire state is basking in the glow of a blowout victory over the Dallas Cowboys, and will now face the 49ers in California¹Though not in San Francisco, because the stadium is nowhere near the city. next week. It feels like 90’s revivalism, Green Bay and Dallas and San Francisco being the relevant playoff organizations at the end of the season. Here’s hoping for continued success for the Packers, if only for the continued improved moods of my friends and neighbors. When the Packers win, the state is a brighter place to live. The sun shines a little higher in the sky, the beer tastes a little better, the brats snap more tautly, the cheese curds squeak a little sharper. Bang on the drum, and Go Pack Go²Of course, should they and Tampa both win, y’all know which side of the Battle of those Bays I’ll be on.!

3: It is Martin Luther King Jr Day in the US, which is a holiday in remembrance and reverence of the work to recognize and respect the rights of all, and one of the most emblematic figures behind it and out in front of it. I won’t be another white guy to co-opt the day to show my own bonafides or to glom onto an effort by recommending the same things everyone points to today³Other than to remind folks about the Letter from the Birmingham City Jail, written in the margins of a statement from white clergy denigrating the efforts of King and on scraps of paper while a political prisoner, which clearly calls out how safe white “allies” are that in name more than deed, but I would recommend taking at least a few minutes today to read, or watch, or listen to those whose voices keep that effort alive and continue to call attention to our opportunities to create a world ready to accept and include all within it.

Projects In Progress

Diagramming things and determining MVPs, and how to do things with the least amount of effort/long-term cost.

Notes:

• 1
  Though not in San Francisco, because the stadium is nowhere near the city.
• 2
  Of course, should they and Tampa both win, y’all know which side of the Battle of those Bays I’ll be on.
• 3
  Other than to remind folks about the Letter from the Birmingham City Jail, written in the margins of a statement from white clergy denigrating the efforts of King and on scraps of paper while a political prisoner, which clearly calls out how safe white “allies” are that in name more than deed