Under the hood, I’ve tidied the site by moving some files that support my tagging system into an appropriate subfolder. The move required that I rewrite some filepaths and test to see that everything still works. It’s looking good so far.
Ann loves to unwind in the evening by making these images. See her tarot page for readings.
Noir was awakened last night by the neighbors’ New Year’s fireworks but didn’t bark or fret. Ann says some outdoor pets around town ran away and a few got run over by cars. We’re glad Noir was in the bedroom; she’s a tough girl but she’s small and dark and not easily seen at night and she has little experience with traffic outside our little soi.
I’m rewriting some of this site’s code[1] so that readers can find posts grouped by tags.
On this day, however, the challenge I face is that my code might be constructing its pagination URLs incorrectly: instead of sending you to page 2 of blog posts by offering a link such as blog?start=2, it may be showing a duplicated query string, e.g. blog?start=2start=2. And this behavior may be related or unrelated to my work on tagging, which also happens to involve query strings.[2]
I work out changes using a copy of the site on my laptop and that’s where these incorrect strings appeared in footnote links.
So I’ve added footnotes to two remarks in the paragraphs above. And my plan is to make this post show up on page 2 or later of the blog (right now there’s only one page). If and when the footnote links are constructed correctly, you’ll be able to inspect them (such as by tapping and holding, or by hovering or right-clicking your computer’s pointer) and see that the start query string isn’t improperly duplicated.
Update, one day later: Tags, pagination, and footnotes appear to be working correctly.
Websites don’t have to use fancy code. You can construct a site with a basic message simply by writing what you want to say, adding a few markup tags, and saving it to a webserver. Sure, you might need to learn what those instructions mean and how to follow them, but it’s doable. ↩︎
The actual numbers shown in the query string will be greater than this but I show ‘2’ here to make the example less confusing. Normally the numbers are multiples of 20—or at least they have been; they reflect not the page number but the number of posts per page, and I could change that to thirty or whatever I like. Today in fact I’ll probably change it to something small while testing, such as 3 or 4, to force the site to spread the posts onto additional pages. ↩︎
Two short items:
A friend who reads tarot cards and works with energies of stones may soon join me in offering services here. Details have yet to be worked out; I’ll post them when I have them.
Recently this phrase popped into my head: Disney-themed funeral home. If such a thing were to exist, would you use the services? I imagine Disney fanatics would be unable to resist.
In 2020 I thought about meaning: how it organizes our brains, how we form it through interaction with others in groups, the ways pursuit of it runs as a thread through my aspirations.
We must have much healing of shared meaning if we as people are to survive.
In a couple of hours, 2021 will come to the Eastern time zone in USA where I write this. A few hours after that, Jupiter will pass exactly opposite my natal Mercury position. It’s a good time for me to consider whether my plans and efforts have been grand enough.
A few days ago I heard a re-broadcast of Patrick Stewart’s Fresh Air interview with Sam Briger, who said to him: “You’ve said that when you first started, when you first started acting, your performances were cautious and that you didn’t want to expose yourself too much. What do you mean by that?” Stewart, then aged 79, said this:
I was told about it by my — the director of my acting school. I went to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. And towards the end of my two years there, he called me into his office and gave me a pretty tough talking to. But the last thing he said to me was, Patrick, you will never achieve success by insuring against failure. And I thought I knew what he meant, but I didn’t — not for years and years and years. And I learned that you have to take risks. You have to be brave. You have to step into the unknown. You have to jump off the edge of the cliff. All of those things are required of actors. Once I’d finally understood that, I knew what direction I had to go in.
Though I sense where I need to go, I continually shut myself down with judgment. Stewart addressed this too:
I’m braver than I was when I was 35. I am not averse to risk-taking. And I don’t judge myself. I used to do that so much. Ah, Patrick, that’s not good enough. That’s not good enough. You could’ve done that differently. You could’ve done it better. That gets in the way of spontaneity and real feeling coming into something.
I set up this website as a conduit for whatever I might wish to do with it. At a minimum I had in mind business and a means of exchanging information with clients, but also a broad range of expression both more personal and more expansive.
In the fifteen years since I registered this domain, I timidly posted a few items, took them down, fiddled with blogging engines, and maintained some files out of public view for use by myself and a few friends and clients (but mostly myself). In recent years, however, I fought the urge to withdraw posts, and that counts for something. It’s not grand but it’s something.
I like grand. Grand will be good, don’t you think?
Last night in the Eastern Hemisphere there was a solar eclipse. Though it was away from my view it is interesting to me because it aligned with Juno and the Midheaven in my birth chart. And the next New Moon will align with my birth chart’s ruling planet, Venus.[1]
After much delay and internal preparation, I think this is a good time for me to become more active and visible and seek to make my mark in the world.
A few seasoned astrologers have said I appear to have Virgo rising, not Libra, in which case my chart’s ruler is Mercury rather than Venus — but the latter is still prominent. ↩︎
In 2005 I got some animation software. A standard exercise for beginning animators, people said, is to create a looping sequence of a ball bouncing in place. An alternative image came to me:
That is, what if the thing went up and came down, and then — thunk! — just sat there until it hurled itself upward again? And anyway what sort of thing would do that?
A rock. A jumping rock.
But a rock is purposeful; it exerts itself for a reason. So I added horizontal motion. This movie is an answer to the question, “If a rock wants to get from A to B, what will it do?”
As soon as I try to be a particular thing, I’m not that thing.
“What do you do?” Just as with some questions the answer isn’t “no” unless you ask, to this question the answer isn’t unknown unless I speak it.
It’s Sun-square-Neptune all over again, perfectly expressed.
The English language is made of knives.
A few of my favorite place pics from the last several years.
A little frozen mystery, twilit and lamplit, outside our local Asian grocery store. I plant it here for luck.