back

Algo brillando

2024-04-28

4 minute read

I'm writing this from the NGV International members lounge. I've been gifted a years membership, and I now intend to use this space liberally. It's nice to have a place to go to write that isn't my room. I don't really enjoy writing in my room at the moment. I think it needs a re-shuffle. Mostly, a shedding of shelves. Also, I don't know how to store my clothes, and have resorted to just stuffing them into the wardrobe haphazardly, with no real system. It is time to start the process of leaving, and hopefully in doing do enjoy my room a little more before I go.

enjoy my room a little

I've been sick this week, and haven't ventured out much. There was a holiday midweek, it created a strange vibe. I got a few things done and out of the way.

A Voz Limpia

The monthly spanish poetry event I go to. I had two poems, that I read out loud. I was extremely nervous, but I did it. Would like to read again, perhaps a cadence of one poem per month or something. Would like to get less nervous. Here are the finished poems, uploaded to a temporary poetry corner on my website: Poems by Louis

Personal Taxonomies - Inspired by this article from the Are.na guides I went through my Are.na and added an index, with different catagories marked by different symbols.

⧉ dump
⚕︎ curation
※ inspo
⛓︎ vision board

full stop . means completed

I've reflected on the nature of curation, and caring for the collections. This was prompted by people doing Are.na "spring cleaning" eg making taxonomies, adding alt text, culling blocks that aren't right for the collection. This is so appealing, so I'm giving it a wee go now. It's always a wip, and can change later.

yesthisislouis.com

I'm not sure what specifically prompted this but I'm working on a styleguide for my personal website. I think it was putting the poetry pages in. I'd just been putting a loose one in each time in a <style> tag, but I've decided I want a global one. Something tight and comprehensive, including every relevant semantic tag, like an actual style guide for a Magazine might have. I like the uniformity of all the same size font, so I'm experimenting with adding decorative embellishments to each level of heading. The first iteration was "₊⊹｡˚⋆ h1 ⋆˚｡⊹₊", but it feels too self concious and, though I love the idea of surfacing the inner workings of a website, I won't this time.

I've just remembered what inspired me to look at my personal website again - I was listening to the html.energy podcast. I love the simplicity of it's goal, and how broad that sentiment can travel. I love the simplicity of an html first, content first site. There is a lightness, a poetry to it.

I think I'm approaching the finish line with bloom. It's been hard than expected, but I've learnt a lot. It will be an approximation of a thistle, because I'm already in over my head.

What else

I've felt very scatter-brained recently. Such is life. It's one thing to do stuff, but even planning to do stuff is an effort. Heaven forbid it's something I haven't done before! There is so much at work I would like to do, but I don't know how to start. I have all the time I want, I can allocate the time I believe is necessary, and yet I can't get anything done. Enough of this for now. I bought an aeropress and I'm really enjoying it. I started Anki again today - reset on my old vocab and set limits to how many new cards per day. It should take me around a month to get back to where I was. ~400 words. I finished Tools for Conviviality, it was good. I would benefit from re-reading it, and reading some others interpretations. I don't think I fully understood it, but I felt that the ideas about tools were good and worth considering. The tools we use have felt stifling and stifled for a long time now. They cannot be weilded like true extensions of self, instead they are more vending machines with poor stock.

The illusion prevailed that the machine was a laboratory-made homunculus, and that it could do our labor instead of slaves. It is now time to correct this mistake and shake off the illusion that men are born to be slaveholders and that the only thing wrong in the past was that not all men could be equally so.

listening to

dog-tired by Camille Keller

questions