I was going to choose Heather Cox Richardson as my Blogger of the Year. She didn't start blogging this year, but this is the year I started reading her daily posts, and I found them valuable and quite bloggy. I also loved her weekly podcast. But in one of the latest nightly posts she writes about smoking guns as if we don't already know the extent of Trump's involvement in the January 6 coup. This general lack of courage on the part of the establishment press and politics is putting our future at great risk. The question isn't whether there's enough evidence to indict every member of the Trump Administration at the end of 2020 and early 2021, but rather why isn't the DoJ led by the supposedly courageous Merrick Garland doing anything to save the republic! When is it going to happen? And what are they afraid of. I think at the end of 2021 a blogger of the year should be grounded in reality. Our patience is long exhausted. Maybe a Civil War is inevitable. Maybe the original Civil War never ended. But I know this, I'd rather have the war while Abraham Lincoln (as played by Joe Biden) is president than Jefferson Davis (Donald Trump). So let's say, for now, there is no Blogger of the Year for 2021. It should have been Heather Cox Richardson, and maybe if she stands up for the republic we can amend the record in 2022. #In the last decade or so I modified my art from making software for everyone to making software mostly for myself. Some projects take years to complete, and some remain on the shelf waiting for their turn to be rolled out. But the best product I've ever made I think is Daytona. A project that I was thinking about for a few years, but when it finally came time to write the code, took about two weeks. Of course I spent a fair amount of time in advance of those two weeks creating packages and techniques that made it possible. But it is right now by far my favorite writing tool. I have most of my writing for the last 20+ years available to me through search, with full text, and a usable UI, unlike the increasingly sparse and unusable commercial search utilities. This proves one thing, there's still a fair amount of unexplored territory in the web. #
My favorite community project of 2021 are the art curators on Twitter. There's a group of Twitter users who, on behalf of great painters throughout history, are posting their works to Twitter. I follow many of them, and have written an open source app that reads their feeds and stores the art in a GitHub-hosted database. Current count: 31,867. It's downloadable and ready to be used in a Mac screen saver. It's a wonderful thing. Sometimes as I'm browsing Twitter one of the works shows up and I stare at it and experience the art, and how observe contrary it is to the rep of Twitter as being a place for loudmouths, psychos, narcissists and insurrectionists. This is pure art and art about art. You can't hold art down, pave it over, commercialize it. Art has a way of popping up through the cracks and sprouting whole new experiences. #
- I was listening to a podcast yesterday about "comfort tv" -- binges that bring you a sense of well-being. That is imho what binges are about.#
- First basic ingredient, suspension of disbelief. While watching the show, from the beginning of the first episode, you must be in the story, not watching tv, but relating to the characters in the same way you relate to real people.#
- From that comes a sense of community, this is your tribe, you think about them the same way as if you were a wild pre-tech human, feeling attached to the other citizens of your village.#
- The feeling of comfort is the feeling of being home, hanging out with your tribe. A feeling the real world no longer gives us, so we create it artificially.#
