Weekly Post 000: Intro

I'm going to start writing. I've been meaning to for a while, of course (who hasn't?) but I've now seen enough blogs of informal yet interesting content that I'm inspired to start also gathering my thoughts together in small piles each week.

One of the reasons is I'd like to be more concise. I tend to be too verbose when I write in a way that makes sense when I'm thinking through the sentence, but loses me on re-reading. I'd like to write shorter sentences. That requires more clarity of thought, which is the second reason for writing: I'd like to start cultivating this as a tool for external processing. Finally, I think it'll be helpful to give myself a space where I can just log what trends I've been following.

Some personal update type blogs I've enjoyed that directly inspired this effort have been Product Lost by Reggie James and recently also The Bounding Box by Tobias Revell. The Bounding Box's subsections, forgiving to one-off thoughts filed under "Small Stuff" and coupled with a new Blender sketch each week, have been compelling and accessible, so I might try to emulate that style.

The plan is to collect thoughts, activities, and interesting articles together in an ongoing document each week, then sift through them all at the end to pull together something cohesive. I haven't decided what I'll do with the topics left on the cutting room floor, but I suppose I'll see how it goes.

I've actually started doing this for this past week and it's turned into a larger-than-expected post on "Music and Spaces" that isn't done yet! Turns out writing is difficult. It might be next week's post or just drop whenever I'm done with it, but I wanted to also make something to post now or else I'd never post at all.

I'll stop myself here.

Small Stuff

• Currently reading Geography of Home by Akiko Busch. It's a series of vignettes on each room in a stereotypical American house, and I mildly recommend it; the references and assessment of "modern life" are very much in 1993, but her approach to discussing each room has led me to think more curiously about my own living spaces, and there's enough historical background for many of the rooms to be still interesting. Also reading through its gentle meditations on spaces feels like a hug.
• I've abandoned reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy for now, not because I disliked it, but coming off of reading both books of the very intense Parable series by Octavia Butler, it was just far too bleak for the current state of the world. The prose is beautiful, but extremely dark. I plan on coming back to it though.
• I built a site for Moss Ives this week using cargo.site, and I highly recommend it. As someone employed as a software engineer, I've always had the ridiculous impulse to build any website I need from scratch (like this one!), but wow there's a lot to be said for just finding an opinionated website builder you agree with and just going with it. I'm not even a front-end developer at all so it's saved a ton of headache.
• My latest piece of music gear has been the PO-33 sampler by Teenage Engineering, a neat little portable sampler and beat maker. It's been a slight learning curve to surmount, but I spent a miraculously rain-free evening wandering around sampling random sounds in the environment, which was a lot of fun!

Until next time,

- Keaton