Summer Site Updates
As you may have noticed, things are a little different around here (hopefully this post goes up at the same time as the theme change). My top resolution this year was to make my website uglier, and I’m cashing in on that now. For now it’s pretty surface-level. I reserve the right to make bigger layout changes later. I’ve been busy, and I don’t know HTML/CSS.
One of the reasons I chose a bland, neutral theme in the first place was to pass it off as a professional site. Since that ship has sailed on a sea of navel-gazey blog posts, I thought I might as well try to have more fun.
The non-aesthetic update is a new section, /now, which will have more casual, more frequent personal updates about what I’m up to. The blog will still continue at its normal (in)frequency. (I doubt I’ll be able to cut off the flow of introspection easily).
For anyone keeping track, the only other resolutions I’ve made progress on were buying a Blu Ray player and joining a choir. The choir was great, a highlight of the year, and I have watched maybe one DVD from the library.
I also realize how silly it was to post a bunch of links that I hadn’t yet read in my last post. Now that I’ve read them all, my favorites were both by Matt Lakeman. Don’t let Notes on Afghanistan’s length dissuade you from reading it. It’s fascinating and I learned so much about the Taliban and someone who puts an outrageous amount of effort into something stupid and dangerous. I would also recommend Infinite Jest Extraction whether you’ve read the book or never plan to. It wouldn’t totally ruin the book if you read it first, but it’s still better to go in blind. I also like it because it comports with my own review but actually has details about the main characters and plots, and as I predicted, I had forgotten a lot about those already.
Honorable mention goes to Dynomight’s So Much Blood which is short, weird, and tickles the part of my brain that likes to know where numbers come from. Also Bret Devereaux’s How your History gets made which does the same for history in general. Nothing about it was groundbreaking, but it’s stuck with me because I find it trippy to think about how and what information gets filtered down from experts to the general public.