An updated site
The year I’ve been taking a break from working. It has been glorious to have unscheduled free time, but, too, a little nerve wracking. Part of how I handle unscheduled time is to…organize it. Nothing too strict, but planning out my weeks, scheduling out trips and projects. This site redesign is an effort that contributes to that.
Simon Willison’s Link Blog also inspired this update. His site demonstrates of how simple links, and one’s thoughts about them are valuable all on their own. He provides a succinct guide for anyone to use his method. Since I’m fairly regularly collecting quotes and links, and not writing down what they mean to me, I thought this practice could be helpful to try out.
In the last several months I’ve established a new journaling practice. Every morning I draw a 4-panel cartoon about the day before. I got the idea from Syllabus, by Linda Berry. Anyhow, I’ve been pretty consistent with it, such that at this point I’m well over a 100 cartoons in.
And so, these are the two big inspirations for the new site: a link blog, and a weekly collection of my daily cartoons. As you’ll see on this and future posts, a smooshed together sequence of cartoons on the header of many posts.
Daily cartoons
My partner was fortunate enough to be a studio assistant at Penland School of Crafts last year. We rented a house nearby, and I worked from our rented space, and kept our cats company (and found a community pottery studio to rent space at). I happened to find Linda Barry’s book at Plott Hound Books - a great little independent bookstore in Burnsville, NC.
I was entranced with the book. For several months I incorporated her Four Square diary method into my journaling practice.
This year I settled into a daily practice of an exercise of drawing a 4-panel cartoon about the day before. No text. Just stick figures. Simple drawings meant to be put down without too much effort, but capturing the essence of a day.
I use a Supernote e-ink tablet to draw these cartoons. This feels very analog. There are some fairly rudimentary copy/paste and layer features, but all that can put out of the way so its just me and the stylus. And, when I’m all done, I can synchronize all my drawings to DropBox. Late last year I wrote a CLI tool called sn2md, which I use to convert my Supernote drawings (and notes) into images and markdown.
For this site, I’ve written a script to compile these cartoons into a weekly strip - at this point its not particularly readable, but conveys, I think, a sense of activities that I did in the week.
