Tag: nostalgia

A Slight Uptick In Energy Levels

John Winkelman

Cicada HatchingThough I have not been in school for about thirty years (barring a brief stint as an adjunct professor in 2005-2006) I still feel an uptick in my mental/emotional energy around this time of year. The end of August meant the winding down of the terrible summer job, prepping for band camp, verifying classes and housing accommodations, and the anticipation of seeing people I had not seen since the beginning of May.

But above all the beginning of the school year meant a reset of sorts. My summer breaks tended to be less than stellar, filled mostly with terrible jobs, bad food, bad beer, and more than a little loneliness. Particularly before I moved permanently out of my parent’s house on the farm in the middle of nowhere. The new school year washed all that away. I started looking forward to returning to the campus before I actually left.

High school was of course terrible through-and-through. The dread of being stuck at home for three months was only slightly less awful than the dread of having to return to school in three months. Though there were some high points, they were good only compared to an extremely low baseline. As I told my uncle a few years ago, “making the best of a bad situation is not the same as being in a good situation.”

But my college experience stuck with me, in no small part because I spent so much time there. Fall of 1987 to spring of 1993, plus a spring semester spent studying in Russia in 1994. That is what I hold on to.

So I am continuing the tradition of refusing to let go of the past by enjoying a small resurgence of my writing energy. This past week I finished transcribing the three dozen poems I wrote during this past April, for National Poetry Month.

In the interest of clarity, I should point out that when I say “poems”, what I really mean is mostly stream-of-consciousness blocks of text which have yet to be edited or even broken into poetic lines, verses and stanzas. None of them are even remotely ready for public viewing or submitting for publication.

I also have scribbled down the outlines for a couple more short stories. At this pace I will have close to 20 by the time NaNoWriMo rolls around, which means I might be able to knock out the first drafts of a dozen or so stories during the month of November. I am feeling cautiously optimistic.

No new reading material arrived in the past week, a state of affairs which is happening more and more frequently. But it’s not like I lack for reading material here at the house.

Speaking of reading, I am about halfway through the anthology Portals, published by Zombies Need Brains as part of their 2019 Kickstarter campaign. I actually submitted my story “Occupied Space” to this anthology, and though it was rejected, it was picked up shortly thereafter by Coffin Bell.

And just to tie everything together, I wrote the original draft “Occupied Space” during NaNoWriMo 2016. Or maybe 2015.

All of which is to say, when the writing mood strikes, seize the opportunity and run with it, because it can be months or years before it happens again.

Gathering the Eggs Back Into the Basket

John Winkelman

As of this weekend, for the first time in a very long time, all of my blog posts going back to 2001 are collected in one place. This has been a project of several weeks, as I had well over 800 old posts to bring into WordPress. Most came from a SQL dump from the previous iteration of my blog which I built in Drupal. Many of the posts therein were from a previous version which I built in TextPattern. Many of the posts therein were from a previous version I built by hand using XML and XSLT. Many of the posts therein were from a previous version I built by hand using static HTML.

Each time I imported or copied or retyped the previous blog’s content into the new blog there were various errors. Either encoding caused some characters to display as gibberish, or extraneous HTML tags caused spacing and flow issues, or embedded CSS caused random fonts and colors to appear. Thus I had to go over each post by hand to ensure that the content of that post was clean and would fit the new software.

The whole exercise has come with a sustained sense of nostalgia. With each post I remembered where I lived, where I was working at the time, what my social life was like, who I was dating (if anyone), and my general opinion of the world. I found I was much more aware of new and upcoming technologies. I reference Wikipedia back when it had only 150,000 articles. And Pandora, when it was still in a sort of beta mode, when the songs it played were cached on the user’s hard drive and could be saved (illegally-ish) for personal use.

Of course the world and the internet (as if those are different things anymore) are vastly different places than they were in 2003 and 2005. New technologies are by and large re-skinnings of current technologies with slightly updated user interactions and tens of millions of dollars spent on marketing. There are still edge cases but they don’t become mainstream until the energy has been sucked from the innovation and inspiration and the corpse of the original idea is turned into a marionette for the pleasure of venture capitalists.

Anyway.

I am still going through and re-linking a couple hundred old photos. Since many of those photos were hosted on old sites I no longer have access to them other than the occasional lucky strike when looking at old versions of eccesignum.com and eccesignum.org using the Internet Archive. I don’t expect I will fix every broken image until sometime around the holidays, unless I find myself unemployed in the next couple of months.

Another problem is that I had well over a hundred Flash experiments on this site. Even if I find all of the .swf files, Flash as a technology is dead dead dead, and my only recourse is to re-create these experiments, toys and games using HTML/JS/CSS. Again, all do-able, just not any time soon. At least for many of the more complex experiments I have the ActionScript files, which translate easily enough to Javascript, even if I will need to re-create by hand many of the things Flash did automatically or with proprietary libraries.

There were years when I wrote two hundred posts, and there were years when I wrote five posts. The productive years were almost all before the advent and ascendance of social media, and many of the posts I ported over were two or three words long, saying, basically, to click here to see something funny or cute or cool.

But I can see this blog coming full circle back to something like that, as social media is a tremendous shitshow even though it is indispensable for anyone whose livelihood depends of attention; for instance, any and all artists. Since I am trying to complete a book, and have written many poems, essays and short stories over the years, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are the best ways to lure people to interact with my creative works.

I have a routine of a single blog post a week which discusses the literary part of my life – book collecting, reading, writing, that sort of thing. Adding to this to discuss the various interesting articles, videos, songs and so on which are part of my weekly media consumption would be trivial. It could be one post or many. And once it is here I can share the post on the various social media outlets, thus centralizing my output, regaining control over my digital life, and picking and choosing when and where I share things. I will own the things I write.

Having over a thousand posts going back twenty years is energizing, and though there are many bloggers who have blogs even older, and with tens (or hundreds!) of thousands of posts, the simple fact that I have a blog which is almost old enough to legally drink, feels good. It feels like an accomplishment, even if the number of regular readers can be counted on part of one hand.

As I complete the bits and pieces of this rebuilt I will probably post more about the process, highlighting old posts which I find particularly interesting or timely for their time. I will also scour the Internet Archive for any old content from the many versions of my website I built back in 1999 and 2000, to see if there is anything worth porting over. In the meantime, I will bask in the much-earned sense of accomplishment.