Craft & Practice #3
I've launched my Chrysalis Essays reflecting on 2020 and shared insights on productivity and digital gardening!
Good morning, afternoon, or evening y’all;
It’s been an active few weeks in my digital garden.
One I feel is most significant, I published my Chrysalis Essays in a new garden at /essays! They’re timeline narratives of my 2020 experience.
Chrysalis Part One covers The Before Times until the end of June.
Chrysalis Part Two covers the rest of the year.
From the garden
Wrote some advice around productivity, and what’s worked for me as I’ve recovered from burn-out. Looking forward to tending this post (right now, a list with small descriptions). ~240 words, 1–2 minute read.
I reflected on work: what it's meant, my relationship with it, and what works best for me. Comes in at ~1,900 words, and a 7–10 minute read.
Deer are eating our lilys, and I accidentally pulled up one of them by the roots (pics, because it did happen). ~200 words, ~1 minute read.
I reflected on performance calibration meetings, one of the most stressful and favorite rituals as a manager. ~530 words, 2–4 minute read.
Dug into CSS’ relational pseudo-selectors
:is(),:not(),:where(), and:has(), working on learning in public. ~750 words, 4–6 minute read.
From the soil
The DIY Web Archiving Zine from the Zine Bakery is a fantastic resource. A simple, 22-page zine covering a topic that feels like a critical in this time of enshittification of knowledge—AI—and fascist destruction of it.
Minimal Computing is a new term for me, and concept that I’m interested in digging into more. For me, the ethos feels related digital gardening, the small web, home-cooked software, and the Indie Web.
The LLMentalist Effect is a lovely letter that compares the current AI hype to that of a psychic grifter. It breaks down the techniques used by psychics and has a strong 1:1 comparison with how AI is being brought to market. (LLM is the abbreviation for large language models; the type of AI the current corporate oligarchs are pushing into anything and everything as inevitable.)
The Archaeology of Orality is a fascinating article that explains how the indigenous Tasmanian Aboriginal (palawa) people’s oral traditions record history…accurately over the course of 10,000 years. It’s amazing how oral history can be so specific and extend that far back!
Building my garden
In addition to the gardening and soil cultivation, I’ve also been working on the garden itself.
Published the RSS and JSON feeds for all the various bits of my garden: for /journal, /links, and everything. Accessible via the site’s footer.
Added this newsletter’s sign up form to the footer, and refactored the footer along the way.
Tweaked & published my /tags page with a slightly nicer UI and step towards eventual functionality.
Updated my typographic stylesheet using Richard Rutter’s default and OpenType typographic stylesheet and Jeremy Keith’s CSS Snippets he’s using these days.
As always, it’ll be a continued work in progress, building over time.
That’s it for this update.
Be safe; take care, and thank you for reading,
Jonathan