article | Chris Aldrich

Hall & Oates Concert October 2021 featuring Squeeze at the Hollywood Bowl

Chris Aldrich — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 05:04:22 +0000

Background and the Pandemic

I originally bought tickets for this show at the Hollywood Bowl on January 25, 2020, but the pandemic obviously delayed the original show date of May 29th. In a fit of optimism on July 16, 2020, the show was rescheduled for October 1, 2021. I really didn’t expect the show to stick. It was my second major crowd outing since the start of the pandemic.

I drove to the Pasadena park and ride location which had just closed because the last bus had just left. They indicated the Zoo location was still open and would have buses until 7pm. So we drove to the LA Zoo bus stop and parked and rode from there. Doing this, even with crowds well masked, was certainly a lot less taxing than sitting in crazy traffic or worrying about parking. The two way fee was a much lower $6 whereas I expected it to be $12 per person.

We got to our seats a bit after the opening act started because of the COVID-19 check-in lines. The lines were miserably managed and social convention went out the window for people cutting in line and generally shifting around.

While vaccination cards or negative tests were required for entrance, they weren’t well organized about it. It would have been all-too-easy to sneak around the COVID check and get directly into the ticket/bag check area which was much more closely guarded and well executed.

Once past the checkpoint not many people were wearing masks. There was approximately 60% masking in public areas outside the Bowl itself, but once seated with a nearly capacity crowd at a sold out show, there was only about 20% masking. I kept a mask on the entire night. Knowing that this would be the case we didn’t take the traditional Hollywood Bowl picnic basket or food.

The weather for the evening was about as lovely as one could have hoped. Not to hot and not too cold which is notable when October evenings can be uncomfortably warm with temperatures in the high 80s to mid 90s.

Opening act: Squeeze

I think I enjoyed the opening act most this evening. They played a few of their hit songs certainly, but I enjoyed the more experimental late 70’s material they played that fell into the vein of Pink Floyd and The Alan Parsons Project as part of the New Wave movement. It was very much the sound of the late 70’s and they recreated it wonderfully in a way that took me back to that space and time. While there were some nice flourishes and musical improvisation sprinkled in, it was closer to their studio/album work in sound and flavor, particularly in comparison to Hall & Oates. Their material generally matched the mood of Hall & Oates’ She’s Gone.

I almost feel like this performance wasn’t as flashy as it may have been in the day. It would be quite something to see them in a more intimate setting like the Troubadour.

The day was one of the band member’s birthdays, so the entire crowd sang happy birthday to close out the performance.

There were a number of women in their 50s standing up and singing and dancing to every number which was interesting to see.

Setlist

I could only recall Mussels, Cool for Cats, Tempted, Annie, Black Coffee, and Happy Birthday from the top of my head as I didn’t keep a written setlist like I did for Hall and Oates. The list below is courtesy of setlist.fm, but all the big pieces appeared in the order that I remember.

Take Me I’m Yours
Up the Junction
Hourglass
Is That Love
Departure Lounge
Slap and Tickle
Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)
Please Be Upstanding
Cool for Cats
Tempted
Annie Get Your Gun
If I Didn’t Love You
Black Coffee in Bed
Happy Birthday to You (Mildred J. Hill & Patty Hill song)
(Sung to bassist Owen Biddle; each band member took a solo spot)

Main Act: Hall and Oates

Starting at 8:50 PM and finishing out at about 10:30 PM

Setlist

Maneater
Out of Touch
Method of Modern Love
Say it Isn’t So
You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling
She’s Gone (High on Consolation)
Sarah Smile
Is it a Star (according to setlist.fm, I didn’t catch the title at the time)
Back Together Again
I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)
—- Encore —
Rich Girl
Your Kiss is on My List (with a slick transition to)
Private Eyes (10:10 PM)
—- Band introductions —-
You Make my Dreams Come True (10:20 PM start)

Band

Shane Theriot (Guitar)
Eliot Lewis (keyboards)
Klyde Jones (Bass)
Brian Dunne (drums)
Porter Carroll Jr. (Percussion)
Charles “Charlie” DeChant (Saxophone)

Brief review

The concert was generally solidly produced. The opening was electric and the crowd gave them a lot of early energy in a nearly packed Bowl. Unfortunately the energy waned within a song and a half. Daryl Hall took about three songs to really warm up his voice. Prior to that I was worried about what I was in for. For someone in his mid-70’s it was a solid performance, but he’s definitely not got the energy of the early 80’s. Late in the program he moved to keyboards and did alright for his age, but there were some obvious rough spots in his solo play.

Given their spot in the Yacht Rock pantheon of highly produced music, I expected to hear more of the polish of their 80’s work, but there was a lot more Jazz and R&B influence on their performance. This was probably great for the Hollywood Bowl regulars where there’s often quite a bit of Jazz programmed, but it just wasn’t the 70s experimental material or the Rock/Pop I was either hoping for or expecting.

Hall’s patter was a bit stilted for me. The quote of the night came between Sarah Smile and the lead into Is it a Star with a drug culture reference:

“I think all the 70’s were experimental.”
—Daryl Hall

Mudstels: the new rage in car colors

Chris Aldrich — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 16:48:28 +0000

A new category of colors perhaps? Cars for the last couple of years have been coming out with a muddy, grungy sort of color palette. In contrast to the more colorful, Easeter-y pastel colors, I’ve been calling this new palette of colors mudstels. They’re usually in shades of blue, green, grey, and tan. There are a few rusty oranges out there, but I’ve yet to see any red, purple, or yellows in the series.

One might call these new mudstel colors a tone, but instead of adding grey to the primary colors and variations thereof, it’s almost as if they’re mixing in a muddy brownish gray. They seem low value and medium chroma to me. Perhaps I should delve into some color theory to better categorize these?

In any case, I’m seeing a lot of them on the road over the past couple of years. Some seem reminiscent of the sorts of industrial colors one would have seen in public schools in the 1940s and 1950s on 20 gauge steel furnishings.

On Note Taking: Putting Ideas into a Crib

Chris Aldrich — Sun, 05 Sep 2021 18:26:10 +0000

I mentioned the word incunable the other day, and a comment on it reminded me that I personally refer to my initial notes on what I read as incunabules. The original Latin (incunabulum, incunabula) translates as “into the crib” and is often used to mean swaddling clothes.

I use incunables in much the same way others in the personal knowledge management space might say fleeting notes. Ideas are born and written onto a page where they are kept in proverbial cribs. Some may grow and and develop into young adults others into old age. Some flourish and later senesce. Ideally one or two outlive me.

As is typical of many species, the care and feeding of the adolescents can be a trying time.

Featured image: LEGO Babies: Nonuplet Nursery flickr photo by cproppe shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license

An Index for My Digital Commonplace Book

Chris Aldrich — Sat, 04 Sep 2021 20:14:03 +0000

In reading about the history of commonplace books, I figured it’d be nice to have a full listing of all the categories and tags on my website for public reference. So I’ve now added an Index page.

I must admit that with a tiny amount of research and set up, I’ve now got something that even John Locke could be jealous of.

For my future self or others interested, I’m using Multi-column Tag Map which has a variety of short codes for implementing various forms of output. Sadly it wasn’t tagged with the word index, so it took some time to find it.

I’ve always had my own administrative interface for this data as well as search and even programmatic tag completion which makes writing and posting easier. However since a lot of what I do is in the public, perhaps it will be useful for readers to have access to the same full list instead of the abbreviated ones that appear as tag clouds or in various sidebars on the site?

Currently I’ve got over 9,000 different tags on the site. Perhaps displaying them publicly will help motivate me to curate and manage them a bit better. I already see a handful of repeated versions based on spelling, spacing, or typos that could be cleaned up. Let’s go crazy!

We’re Not All That: High School is America in miniature

Chris Aldrich — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 16:16:38 +0000

High school is just a bunch of scared people pretending they’re not.
—Cameron Kweller portrayed by Tanner Buchanan in He’s All That (Netflix, 2021)

While not exact, this quote is incredibly similar in tone to a quote from a columnist in June 1928, which has been oft repeated and slightly modified since including versions by Will Rogers and in Fight Club.

Americanism: Using money you haven’t earned to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like.
—Robert Quillen, The Detroit Free Press, Page 6, Column 4, Detroit, Michigan. June 4, 1928

It’s all about image and being what we’re not.

Apparently the message of the original film She’s All That was completely lost. I’m not sure the current incarnation of this remake will be an inflection point either.

Gardens and Streams II: An IndieWebCamp Pop-up Session on Wikis, Digital Gardens, Online Commonplace Books, Zettelkasten and Note Taking

Chris Aldrich — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 21:03:51 +0000

Event Details

Date: Saturday, September 25, 2021
Time: 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM Pacific
Event page:

We’ll discuss and brainstorm ideas related to wikis, commonplace books, digital gardens, zettelkasten, and note taking on personal websites and how they might interoperate or communicate with each other. This can include IndieWeb building blocks, user interfaces, functionalities, and everyones’ ideas surrounding these. Bring your thoughts, ideas, and let’s discuss (and build).

This will be a continuation of the ideas from the Garden and Stream pop up session in 2020. Everyone is welcome and need not have attended prior sessions.

Format

We’ll try to do something between a traditional all day IndieWebCamp and a single session pop-up over the span of several hours so that we can accommodate a brief introduction and three BarCamp topic related sessions. Feel free to brainstorm session ideas in advance of the mini-camp, but we’ll choose session topics the morning of the event.

Tentative Schedule

All times Pacific.

9:00 AM 30 minute introduction & IndieWeb building blocks
9:30 AM 20 minute session pitches and scheduling
9:50 AM 10 minute break
10:00 AM 60 minute Session 1 (including 10 minute break)
11:00 AM 60 minute Session 2 (including 10 minute break)
12:00 PM 50 minute Session 3
12:50 PM 10 minute closing remarks
1:00 PM pop up finished

Hack day? Yes, we’ll all gather the following day for 3 hours at roughly the same time with a short demo session to follow for folks to show off what they’ve been working on. Details for this will be forthcoming.

Everyone is welcome to attend.

Resources

Technology for attending
IndieWeb Chat Room
Etherpad: (for real time session planning, chat, questions, and note taking during the session)

hashtag: #GardensAndStreams
Code of Conduct: This event is covered by the IndieWeb Code of Conduct. By participating, you’re acknowledging your acceptance of this code.
Notes and archived video for this session, once finished, can be found at

RSVP (optional)

If your website supports it, post an indie RSVP as a reply to this post or to the event page.
Or, log in to indieweb.org and on the event page click “I’m Going”.
Or, RSVP your attendance to this syndicated Tweet
Or, Add a comment below indicate that you’ll be attending.

And if none of the above methods means anything to you or you can’t log in to use them, don’t worry about it; just show up on the day!

Questions? Concerns? Volunteers?

Feel free to ask in the IndieWeb chat: or post a question below or on the call for volunteers post.

Social Media, Fast and Slow

Chris Aldrich — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 18:26:53 +0000

I like the differentiation that Jared has made here on his homepage with categories for “fast” and “slow” posts.

It’s reminiscent of the system 1 (fast) and system2 (slow) ideas behind Kahneman and Tversky’s work in behavioral economics. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow)

It’s also interesting in light of this tweet which came up recently:

I very much miss the back and forth with blog posts responding to blog posts, a slow moving argument where we had time to think.

— Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) August 22, 2017

Because the Tweet was shared out of context several years later, someone (accidentally?) replied to it as if it were contemporaneous. When called out for not watching the date of the post, their reply was “you do slow web your way…”^#

This gets one thinking. Perhaps it would help more people’s contextual thinking if more sites specifically labeled their posts as fast and slow (or gave a 1-10 rating)? Sometimes the length of a response is an indicator of the thought put into it, thought not always as there’s also the oft-quoted aphorism: “If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter”.

The ease of use of the UI on Twitter seems to broadly make it a platform for “fast” posting which can too often cause ruffled feathers, sour feelings, anger, and poor communication.

What if there were posting UIs (or micropub clients) that would hold onto your responses for a few hours, days, or even a week and then remind you about them after that time had past to see if they were still worth posting? This is a feature based on Abraham Lincoln’s idea of a “hot letter” or angry letter, which he advised people to write often, but never send.

Where is the social media service for hot posts that save all your vituperation, but don’t show them to anyone? Or which maybe posts them anonymously?

The opposite of some of this are the partially baked or even fully thought out posts that one hears about anecdotally, but which the authors say they felt weren’t finish and thus didn’t publish them. Wouldn’t it be better to hit publish on these than those nasty quick replies? How can we create better UI to solve for this?

I saw a sitcom a few years ago where a girl admonished her friend (an oblivious boy) for liking really old Instagram posts of a girl he was interested in. She said that deep-liking old photos was an obvious and overt sign of flirting.

If this is the case then there’s obviously a social standard of sorts for this, so why not hold your tongue in the meanwhile, and come up with something more thought out to send your digital love to someone instead of providing a (knee-)jerk reaction?

Of course now I can’t help but think of the annotations I’ve been making in my copy of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. Do you suppose that Lucretius knows I’m in love?

Humanity is the medium. Humanity is the message.

Chris Aldrich — Sun, 25 Jul 2021 19:30:19 +0000

While contemplating orality and indigenous cultures and how they used their own memories, conversation, and dialectic as a means of communicating and storing their knowledge, I thought about Marshall McLuhann’s idea “the medium is the message.” In this framing, indigenous cultures certainly got things right: Humanity is the medium. Humanity is the message.

Life imitates art. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.
— John M. Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review, March 1967)

Culkin’s framing also makes humanity its own self-contained tool (hopefully for the greater good). We shape our brains and thereafter our brains shape us. While we may use technology and tools, props, and crutches to help us do more or do faster, we shouldn’t loose sight of our humanity. It may be our greatest technology. Perhaps we need to remember to pull it out of our toolbox more often as it’s better evolved and often better fit for more jobs than the tools we’re apt to turn to.

Hypothes.is + Obsidian = Hypothesidian for easier note taking and formatting

Chris Aldrich — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 16:18:43 +0000

Anyone who knows me knows that I love Hypothes.is for all my online highlighting, annotating, and general note taking. They also know that if one isn’t actively using their notes to some better end, then it’s likely not worth having taken them at all, so I store mine in markdown in Obsidian for future-proofing and portability.

Hypothes.is + Obsidian

A while back I came across RoamHacker’s work to dovetail Hypothes.is for use in Obsidian and finally managed to get it up and running with my Obsidian vault. I’ve previously outlined a method for pulling in my notes from Hypothes.is using RSS, however this doesn’t give one any formatting capabilities and it also doesn’t provide any of the Hypothes.is tags as RSS has no layer for taxonomies.

RoamHacker’s work, which leverages the Templater Plugin for Obsidian, fixes both of these problems. I suspect that I’ll keep my prior method in place to create the individual notes, but use this additional work to clean up my fleeting notes from Hypothes.is in my actual commonplace book. Since there’s no server involved, it’s harder to automate the entire process so that every time you create notes they’re automatically ported across either in real-time or in batches every few hours.

Formatting your notes

I did spend some time last night to modify some of RoamHacker’s code to re-format the annotations to better suit my current notes format and layout. I’m excerpting the most relevant part below, but the entire Gist can also be downloaded or further modified for easier copy/pasting into one’s own vault for the needed set up.

I’ve only modified the section of the original Gist at the bottom that follows the line:
/* TEMPLATE STARTS HERE */

The changes still keep all the relevant data fields, but reorder them and add a bit of formatting to fit the layout and the way I use my Obsidian notebook. I changed the formatting so that tags in Hypothes.is are turned into [[wikilinks]] rather than #⁠hashtags as in the original. (The original also doesn’t do so well with multi-word tags, which I use quite a lot.)

Hopefully the small changes I’ve made and comparison with the original Gist will allow those who aren’t as code-savvy to better understand the template and potentially let them make changes to suit their own needs.

/* TEMPLATE STARTS HERE */ 
if (tp.file.content.length==0) {
  //likely a new document, insert front matter
  tR += `---\n`;
  tR += `fileType: HypothesisAnnotations\n`;
  tR += `creationDate: ${tp.date.now('YYYY-MM-DD')} \n`;
  tR += `annotationDate: ${articleAnnotations[0].created.substring(0,10)}\n`;
  tR += `uri: ${articleAnnotations[0].uri}\n`;
  tR += `---\n`;
}

tR += `# ${articleAnnotations[0].title}\n`
tR += `URL: ${articleAnnotations[0].uri}\n\n`

for( a of articleAnnotations) {
  let tags = '';
  let user = '';
  if(a.tags.length>0) tags = ' ' + (a.tags.map(t=> '[['+ t + ']]')).join(' ');
  if(insertUser) user = ' _(' + a.user.replace('acct:','').replace('@hypothes.is','') + ')_';
  if(a.text) tR += `${a.text}\n—[[${user}]]\n\n`;
  tR += `## Source \n`;
  tR += `> ${a.highlight}[^1]\n\n`;
  tR += `[^1]: [${articleAnnotations[0].title}](${articleAnnotations[0].uri}) | [syndication link](tk) \n`;
  tR += `\n---\ntags: \nlinks: ${tags} \n- broader terms (BT):  \n- narrower terms (NT):  \n- related terms (RT):  \n- used for (UF) or aliases:  \nconnected ideas:  \nMOC:  \n\n---\n`;
}
%>

Differentiating online variations of the Commonplace Book: Digital Gardens, Wikis, Zettlekasten, Waste Books, Florilegia, and Second Brains

Chris Aldrich — Sat, 03 Jul 2021 23:25:31 +0000

A fluorescence of note taking tools

Over the past three or so years there has been a fluorescence of digital note taking tools and platforms.

Some of these include:

Open source projects like Org Mode, Logseq, Foam, Jupyter, Trilium, Databyss, Athens, Dendron, Anagora, and Hypothes.is.

Closed sourced projects like: Roam Research, Notion, Knovigator, Amplenote, RemNote, Memex, Nototo, nvUltra, and Are.na.

Some are based on earlier incarnations of note taking and writing tools like OneNote, Evernote, Simple Note, TiddlyWiki, DEVONthink, Scrivener, etc.

This brief list doesn’t take into account a sea of other mobile apps and platforms in addition to a broad array of social media platforms that people use for similar note taking or annotations.

My particular interest in some of this note taking field comes in the growing number of people who are working in public and sharing their notes in online settings with others. This has been happening organically since the rise of the internet and has happened on blogs within the blogosphere and on personal and communal wikis.

As was highlighted (pun intended) at the recent I Annotate 2021 conference, the note taking space seems to have been coming to a new boil. With the expansion of the ideas of keeping a zettelkasten or a digital garden, these versions of notebooks seem to be a significant part of this new note taking craze.

One thing I have noticed, however, is a dramatic lack of continuity in the history of note taking within the longue durée of Western civilization. (Other cultures including oral cultures have similar traditions, but for our purposes here, I won’t go into them except to say that they’re highly valuable, spectacularly rich, and something of which we should all be aware.)

Many of these products are selling themselves based on ideas or philosophies which sound and even feel solid, but they’re completely ignoring their predecessors to the tune of feeling like they’re trying to reinvent the wheel. As a result, some of the pitches for these products sound like they’re selling snake oil rather than tried and true methods that go back over 2,000 years of intellectual history. I can only presume that modern education is failing us all dramatically. People are “taught” (maybe told is the better verb) to take notes in school, but they’re never told why, what to do with them, or how to leverage them for maximum efficiency. Perhaps the idea has been so heavily imbued into our culture we’ve honestly forgotten the basic parts and reasoning behind it?

Even Vannevar Bush’s dream of the Memex as stated in his article As We May Think (The Atlantic, 1945), which many of these note taking applications might point to as an inspiration, ignores this same tradition and background, so perhaps these app creators and users aren’t all to blame?

Delineating Online Forms

I’ve been doing some serious reading and research into these traditions to help uncover our missing shared history. I’ll write something longer and more specific about them at a later date.

In the meanwhile, I want to outline just a bit about the various flavors as they relate to some of the more public online versions that I see in the related internet spaces. I hope to help better delineate what they have in common, how they differ, and what they may still add to the mix to get us to a more robust version of Bush’s dream.

Other’s thoughts and comments about these various incarnations and their forms and functions are both encouraged and appreciated.

Commonplace books

Historically commonplace books are one of the oldest and most influential structures in the note taking, writing, and thinking space. They have generally been physical books written by hand that contain notes which are categorized by headings (or in a modern context categories or tags. Often they’re created with an index to help their creators find and organize their notes.

They originated in ancient Greece and Rome out of the thought of Aristotle and Cicero as a tool for thinking and writing and have generally enjoyed a solid place in history since. A huge variety of commonplaces have been either copied by hand or published in print book form over the centuries.

Most significant thinkers, writers, and creators throughout history have kept something resembling a commonplace book. While many may want to attribute the output of historical figures like Erasmus, Newton, Darwin, Leibnitz, Locke, or Emerson to sheer genius (and many often do), I might suggest that their works were the result of sustained work of creating personal commonplace books—somewhat like a portable Google search engine for their day, but honed to their particular interests. (One naturally can’t ignore their other many privileges like wealth, education, and time to do this work, which were also certainly a significant factor in their success.)

Many people over the past quarter of a century have used a variety of digital forms to keep digital commonplace books including public versions on blogs, wikis, and other software for either public or private consumption.

Florilegium

Florilegia are a subcategory of commonplace book starting around 900 CE but flourishing in the 12th and 13th centuries and primarily kept by theologians and preachers. The first were a series of short excerpted passages often arranged in order of their appearance in a single text, but eventually were arranged systematically under discrete headings. Medieval florilegia where overwhelmingly, and often exclusively, concerned with religious topics from the works of scriptures, the moral dicta of the Doctors of the Church, and—less frequently—the teachings of approved, classical moral philosophers. The idea and form of florilegium generally merged back into the idea of the commonplace book which had renewed interest and wide popularity during the Renaissance.

These didn’t add any new or innovative features over what had come before. Perhaps, if anything, they were a regression because they so heavily focused only on religion as a topic.

Few (if any) examples of florilegia can be found in modern digital contexts. Though I have seen some people talk about using digital note taking tools for religious study, I have yet to see public versions online.

Zettelkästen

Born out of the commonplace tradition with modifications by Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) and descriptions by Johann Jacob Moser (1701–1785), the Zettelkasten, a German word translated as “slip box”, is generally a collection of highly curated atomic notes collected on slips of paper or index cards. Zettelkasten were made simpler to create and maintain with the introduction of the mass manufacture of index cards (and card boxes and furniture) in the early 20th century. Slips of paper which were moveable within books or files and later on index cards were a significant innovation in terms of storing and organizing a commonplace book.

Generally zettels (or cards) are organized by topics and often contain dates and other taxonomies or serialized numbers as a means of linking them to other cards within the system. The cross linking of these cards (and thus ideas) were certainly a historical physical precursor of the internet we have today, simply in digital form.

Almost all the current references I’ve seen online to Zettelkasten mention Niklas Luhmann as their inspiration, but none of them reference any other well-known historical examples despite the fact the idea has been around and evolving for several centuries now.

This productivity system and sets of digital tools around it came to greater attention in Germany in 2013 with the exhibition “Zettelkästen: Machines of Fantasy” at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar and in 2014 with the launch of the zettelkasten.de website. A subsequent boost in the English speaking world occurred following the publication of Sönke Ahrens’s book How to Take Smart Notes – One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers in February 2017. The recent ability to use platforms like Roam Research, Obsidian, Notion, et al. has helped to fan the flames of their popularization.

More often than not, most of these digital tools (like their card-based predecessors) are geared toward private personal use rather than an open public model. Roam Research and Obsidian Publish have features which allow public publishing. TiddlyWiki is also an excellent tool for this as its so-called Tiddlers have a card-based appearance and can be placed in custom orders as well as transcluded, but again not many are available to the online public.

Waste books/Sudelbücher

This sub-genre of notebooks comes out of the tradition of double-entry book keeping where accountants often kept a daily diary of all transactions in chronological order. These temporary notes were then later moved into a more permanent accounting ledger and the remaining book was considered “waste”.

In the commonplace book tradition, these books for temporary notes or (fleeting notes in a Zettelkasten framing), might eventually be copied over, expanded, and indexed into one’s permanent commonplace collection.

In modern digital settings, one might consider some of the ephemeral social media stream platforms like Twitter to be a digital version of a waste book, though to my knowledge I may be the first person to suggest this connection. (To be clear, others have certainly mentioned Twitter as being a waste and even a wasteland.)

Wikis

Inspired, in part, by Apple’s HyperCard, Ward Cunningham created the first public wiki on his website on March 25, 1995. Apple had designed a system allowing users to create virtual “card stacks” supporting links among the various cards (sound familiar?). HyperCard was designed as a single user system.

Wikis allowed multiple users to author and edit pages on the web with a basic web browser. They were also able to create meaningful links and associations between pages, whether they existed or not using [[WikiLinks]]. They were meant to allow the average visitor to participate in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration.

Here there is some innovative user interface as well as the ability to collaborate with others in keeping a commonplace book. Transclusion of one page into another is a useful feature here.

Personal wikis have been used (as have many blogs) for information aggregation and dissemination over the years in a manner similar to their historical predecessors.

Second brain

Second brain is a marketing term which stands in for the idea of the original commonplace book. It popped up in the note taking context in early 2017 for promoting the use of commonplace books techniques using Tiago Forte’s expensive online course Building a Second Brain which focused on capturing, organizing, and sharing your knowledge using (digital) notes. It is a platform agnostic method for improving productivity wholly using the commonplace underpinning.

Google searches for this term will be heavily mixed in with results about the gastrointestinal system being the body’s “second brain”, the enteric nervous system, second brain tumors, a debunked theory that dinosaurs had two brains, and other general health-related topics.

Some websites, personal wikis and other online versions will use the phrase second brain, but they generally have no innovative features that are missing from prior efforts. Again, I view the phrase simply as marketing with no additional substance.

Digital Gardens

Informed heavily by their cultural predecessors in commonplace books, zettelkasten, and wikis, digital gardens are digital first note collections which are primarily public by default and encourage the idea of working in public.

Digital Gardens arose more formally in 2019 and 2020 out of the work and influence of Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas, Ward Cunningham’s Smallest Federated Wiki (which just celebrated it’s 10th anniversary), Mike Caulfield’s essays including The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral as well as some influence from the broader IndieWeb Community and their focus on design and user interface.

Digital garden design can often use the gardening metaphor to focus attention on an active tending and care of one’s personal knowledge base and building toward new knowledge or creations. The idea of planting a knowledge “seed” (a note), tending it gradually over time with regular watering and feeding in a progression of Seedlings → Budding → Evergreen is a common feature.

There are a growing number of people with personal digital gardens in public. Many are built on pre-existing wiki software like WikiMedia, the Smallest Federated Wiki, or TiddlyWiki, static site generators like Jekyll, note taking platforms like Obsidian Publish and Roam Research, or even out of common blogging software like WordPress. A growing common feature of these platforms is that they not only link out to resources on the open web, but contain bidirectional links within themselves using either custom code (in a wiki-like manner) or using the W3C Webmention specification.

The Future?

With luck, application and platform designers and users will come to know more about the traditions, uses, and workflows of our rich cultural note taking history. Beyond this there are a few innovations, particularly in the public-facing arena which could be useful, but which aren’t broadly seen or available yet.

Still missing from the overall personal knowledge and note taking space is a more tightly integrated version of both a garden and a stream (in Mike Caulfield’s excellent framing) that easily allows interaction between the two arenas. Some of the more blog-based sites with notes, bookmarks, articles and IndieWeb friendly building blocks like Webmention, feeds (RSS, JSON Feed, h-feed), Micropub, and Microsub integrations may come the closest to this ideal.

One of the most fascinating recent entrants on the scene is Flancian’s Anagora which he uses as a personal commonplace book in a wiki-esque style. Over other incarnations it also has the ability to pull in and aggregate the notes of other digital commonplace books to create a larger marketplace of ideas. It also includes collaborative note taking space using Etherpad, which I’ve seen as a standalone tool, but never integrated into a digital commonplace book.

Ultimately, my dream—similar to that of Bush’s—is for individual commonplace books to be able to communicate not only with their users in the Luhmann-esqe sense, but also communicate with each other.

Niklas Luhmann apparently said:

Ohne zu schreiben, kann man nicht denken; jedenfalls nicht in anspruchsvoller, anschlussfähiger Weise.

(Translation) You cannot think without writing; at least not in a sophisticated, connectable way.

I think his conceptualization of “connectable” was much more limited and limiting than he might have guessed. Vannevar Bush, as the academic advisor of Claude Shannon, the godfather of the modern digital age, was more prepared to envision it.

(Luhmann’s “you” in his quote is obviously only a Western cultural referent which erases the existence of oral based cultures which have other ways to do their sophisticated thinking. His ignorant framing on the topic shouldn’t be a shared one.)

This post has grown out of my own personal commonplace book, portions of which are on housed on my blog, in a wiki, and in a private repository of which I hope to make more public soon. Further thoughts, ideas and expansions of it are more than welcome.

I’ve slowly been updating pieces of the history along with examples on shared commonplaces in both the IndieWeb Wiki and Wikipedia under the appropriate headings. Feel free to browse those or contribute to them as you would, at least until our digital commonplace books can communicate with each other.

I’d also invite those who are interested in this topic and who have or want online spaces to do this sort of thing to join us at the proposed upcoming Gardens and Streams II IndieWebCamp Pop up session which is being planned for later this Summer or early Fall. Comment below, stop by the page or chat to indicate your interest in attending.

Planning for Gardens and Streams II: An IndieWebCamp pop-up session on Wikis, Digital Gardens, online Commonplace Books, and note taking

Chris Aldrich — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 21:07:24 +0000

Following this past week’s I Annorate 2021 note taking sessions and the original Gardens and Steams IndieWeb pop up event last year, I thought it wold be a good idea to have a structured and open follow up.

I’ve sketched out some ideas on the IndieWeb wiki at Feel free to share your ideas there or indicate your interest and preferred dates. If you have ideas for discussion sessions within the pop up, feel free to start sharing those as well. These should be discussion oriented. Depending on interest/demand we can add additional tracks, days, and times as necessary.

You can also use the IndieWeb #meta chat as well. See their chat page for other methods for joining the chat using your favorite platform.

This will be a volunteer-led BarCamp style online event, so help in organizing and executing is greatly appreciated. The more help we get, the easier it is to do and the more we can potentially accomplish. Participants must agree to abiding by their Code of Conduct.

Course Announcement: The Art of Memory

Chris Aldrich — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 18:32:14 +0000

I’m teaching an upcoming course on the Art of Memory. It’ll be an hour a week for five weeks starting on July 10th at 10:00 am on Saturday mornings. I’ll be using the online learning platform Hyperlink.Academy. I hope you’ll have the chance to join me and a group of people interested in exploring the topic.

I’ve had a personal memory practice since I was about eleven years old. I started with an old correspondence course from the 1940s that I found on my parents’ bookshelf. I remember thinking at the time that it was pretty expansive. I’ve realized that the original system I learned was only a small fraction of some of the powerful techniques that humankind has created and evolved over the last 20,000 years. Sadly, the majority of this knowledge, which was once commonplace, has disappeared in Western culture.

As a kid, I used the techniques as they pertained to magic and parlor tricks like counting cards and Rubic’s cubes. Later I learned how to bend and apply them other methods. I learned new methods and used them to memorize material for classes. I discovered I could remember vast troves of information both for pleasure and for work.

Since then, I’ve been researching into the history of mnemotechniques in Western culture. I’ve been uncovering the practice in other oral and indigenous cultures. As a result, I’ve seen and experimented with dozens of other methods. Some are better and more flexible than others.

It’s rare that I encounter people familiar with even one or two of these methods. There are lots of books and internet fora dedicated to some of them. They’re generally esoteric, incomplete, or both. On the whole, they’re difficult to discover, and often even harder to learn—much less practice.

In 2011, Joshua Foer ignited some interest with his book Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. He describes the magic of some of the extant systems and nibbles around the edges. But he doesn’t detail how to enter the space and leaves the topic as esoteric as he began. His book motivates the “why”, but doesn’t describe the practical “how”.

I have seen and read scores of hucksterish and facile approaches. They usually outline a handful of memory “tricks” which some people use intuitively. Most touch on only one or two aspects of a much larger and richer memory tradition.

I’ve also followed some of the bigger memory-related sites online. They discuss many pieces of the whole. But they don’t help newcomers get a bigger picture of what is possible or how to start a practice. Most people want something more practical for daily life. Many start out with interest, but they don’t get very far before abandoning the idea because they don’t find the benefit.

I know there is an easier way.

Based on my experience, I’d like to provide a solid overview and history of the topic. My goal is to give beginners a practical entry point. We’ll look at and practice the bigger and most useful techniques. We’ll also discuss some of the lesser known methods and where they can be applied.

I encourage students to bring a practical list of things they’d like to memorize for use in the course.

After a few weeks, students should have a solid base of knowledge upon which to found a regular memory practice for the rest of their lives.

Those interested can read a copy of the syllabus. If you have any questions about the course or want to discuss if it’s right for you, please reach out.

If you can’t join us for the first cohort this summer, I’ll likely offer it again in either the Fall or Winter.

I look forward to seeing everyone in class.

Jake Reeder’s Return to Cinder site and related Databyss platform

Chris Aldrich — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 03:06:01 +0000

The coolest thing I think I saw at I Annotate 2021 today was Jake Reeder’s commonplace book for his reading notes and annotations. It’s very IndieWeb in some of the coolest ways.

He apparently began collecting his notes and annotations of Jacques Derrida using paper and pen, but transferred them into the cleverly named website Return to Cinder.

The site ultimately grew to include additional writers and works (thus also making it a personal library of sorts. It ultimately became valuable enough to Reeder that, with the help of Paul Hine for development they turned his site into a note taking platform available for other people called Databyss, which appears to be a silo note taking platform that allows users to:

Write and cite, research and re-search, and never get lost in Databyss. Welcome to your new word processor.

Users can register for a free account which includes hosting and storage, though doesn’t appear to allow custom domain names. I’m not clear what the potential business model is or may be, so be sure you’ve got the ability to back up and save your data elsewhere just in case. The interface looks very similar to Roam Research and some of the similar products in that same niche, though in this case the result is online rather than necessarily a private local repository or a private space in the cloud.

While the lack of end game for Databyss might worry me, the user interface examples of Jake’s personal site and the bigger platform are fascinating for the overall space. It would be cool to see how other IndieWeb building blocks might be included in these platforms to expand the space of both personal libraries and digital gardens.

Some brief thoughts on I Annotate 2021 from today

Chris Aldrich — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 05:29:36 +0000

I both learned and had a lot of fun at I Annotate 2021 today. Since annotation is something I do literally on a daily basis (pun intended), it’s nice to devote some significant time to thinking about the idea and the process as well as to see and hear how others practice it in a wide variety of settings.

For those catching up, I’ve posted a number of items, bookmarks, reads, notes, and annotations to my website today under the I Annotate 2021 tag. You can find copies of most of it mirrored on Hypothesis (along with others using the same tag) at #⁠IAnno21.

I’ve also started a Twitter list of folks who are participating there as well if you care to either follow the list and/or quickly follow other participants. Drop me a note if you know of some I’m either missing or ought to add to the list.

One of my favorite parts is seeing a variety of non-education specific people joining in the conversation.

I can’t wait to see what Ward Cunningham and others have to say about the Future of Note Taking tomorrow. It portends to be my favorite topic of the conference though I’ll reserve judgement until the end.

I can’t see a good/convenient place to arrange a Birds of a Feather (BoF) note taking hallway discussion in the Lounge in tomorrow’s schedule unless we do it at the very end of the day. This would mean potentially missing some people from Europe who I know would like to participate. Perhaps I’ll put something together either for Wednesday morning before the official program or during the 2:30-3:00 PM slot between some of the bigger sessions? Let me know if you’d like to participate. I’m also not sure about the potential limit of 4 people at each of the Lounge areas; if we need more space, perhaps we’ll adjourn to Zoom or a similar platform?

Protected: For the IndieWeb: A method for private posts shared with those who have a shared context

Chris Aldrich — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 16:27:47 +0000

Chris Aldrich — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 16:45:34 +0000

Having a (digital) commonplace book means that I have infinite space in my margins.

Differential Topology—Two quarter sequence at UCLA Extension for Fall/Winter 2021

Chris Aldrich — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 17:33:32 +0000

It hasn’t been announced officially in the UCLA Extension catalog, but Dr. Mike Miller’s anticipated course topic for Fall 2021 is differential topology. The anticipated recommended text is Differential Topology: An Introduction by David B. Gauld (M. Dekker, 1982 or Dover, 1996 (reprint)).

The offering is naturally dependent on potential public health measures in September, which may also create a class limit on the number of attendees, so be sure to register as soon as it’s announced. For those who are interested in mathematics, but have never attended any of Dr. Miller’s lectures, I’ve previously written some details about his stye of presentation, prerequisites (usually very minimal despite the advanced level of the topics), and other details.

A few of us have already planned weekly Thursday night topology study sessions through the end of Spring and into Summer for those interested in attending. Just leave a comment with your contact information and I’ll be in touch with details.

I hope to see everyone in the fall.

An Euclidean Declaration

Chris Aldrich — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 17:24:08 +0000

So far, my favorite part of Jordan Ellenberg‘s new book Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else is this footnoted observation:

“we hold these truths to be self-evident” wasn’t Jefferson’s line; his first draft of the Declaration has “we hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable.” It was Ben Franklin who scratched out those words and wrote “self-evident” instead, making the document a little less biblical, a little more Euclidean.

Creating Internal Backlinks for MediaWiki for Digital Gardeners

Chris Aldrich — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 07:12:15 +0000

I’d spit-balled the general idea of showing backlinks or bidirectional links on a MediaWiki instance last year when thinking about and adding Webmention to one. Tonight I tinkered around and actually set it up on an instance. Within a MediaWiki, one can transclude all the backlinks from other pages to a particular page by adding a line for transcluding content like the following when editing a page:

{{Special:WhatLinksHere/PageName|limit=1000}}

You can see a live example of the practice on my user page on the IndieWeb wiki at along with the code I used by clicking on the edit tab. The effect is rather nice, particularly when put into columns when there are lots of entries. I’ll have to look into automatically coding something like this into every page now, but being able to do it manually is most of the battle, right?

Doing this along with adding display for external webmentions quickly vaults MediaWiki to a solidly first class web-enabled digital commonplace book/digital garden/Memex/zettelkasten tool that can communicate with other similarly enabled tools. (Now if only Webmention were supported natively on MediaWiki… but there are definitely ways around this in the meanwhile.)

To go the extra mile, I know there’s the ability to interlink wikis with some custom syntax or even to show hovercards within a wiki. Both MediaWiki and Wikipedia already allow this after enabling page previews using hovercards in 2018. (I’ll have to check out if one could do hovercards across wikis as well!?!)

I’ve slowed down some of my experiments with my personal MediaWiki in preference to using Obsidian lately. Perhaps, for working in public, I’m going to have to resume some of my experiments and/or figure out a way to mirror the content?

↬ Sister Heather Kristine in knowledge-management discord for Obsidian (05/28/2021 22:41:02) for re-sparking idea.

Thoughts on Jeet Heer’s Can We Bring Back Blogging?

Chris Aldrich — Thu, 13 May 2021 22:30:24 +0000

Jeet Heer recently wrote a piece (on Substack) entitled Can We Bring Back Blogging? where he waxed a bit nostalgic for the old blogosphere.

This makes me wonder: did blogging die off because the tools changed?

Everyone had their own space on the internet and the internet itself was the medium which opened up the conversation. I could use WordPress while someone else might have been on Blogger, Moveable Type, Live Journal, TypePad, or something they made in HTML themselves.

Now it’s all siloed off into tinier spaces where content is trapped for eyeballs and engagement and there’s not nearly as much space for expression. Some of the conversation is broken up into 280 character expressions on Twitter, some on Instagram, and now people are aggregating content inside Substack. Substack at least has a feed I can subscribe to and a free form box to add a reply.

I appreciate Jeff’s comment about the “flywheel of social media”. We’re definitely going to need something like that to help power any resurgence of the blogosphere. I also like to think of it in the framing of “thought spaces” where the idea of a blog is to give yourself enough space to form a coherent idea and make an actual argument. Doing that is much harder to do on a microblog where the responses are also similarly limited. It just feels so rude to post 250 words in reply to a sentence or two that probably needed more space to express itself too.

I suspect that if we want a real resurgence of thought and discourse online, we’re going to need some new tools to do it. As Friedrich Nietzsche famously conceded to his friend Heinrich Köselitz “You are right — our writing tools take part in the forming of our thoughts.”

It would help if we could get back to the bare metal of the internet in which to freely operate again. Substack at least feels close to that, though it could be much better.

Can we have a conversational medium that isn’t constrained by a handful of corporate silos that don’t allow conversation across boundaries? Can we improve the problems of context collapse we’re seeing in social media?

I’d like to think that some of the building blocks the IndieWeb movement has built might help guide the way. I love their idea of Webmention notifications that allow one site to mention another regardless of the platforms on which they’re built. Their Micropub posting tools abstract away the writing and posting experience to allow you to pick and choose your favorite editor. They’ve got multiple social reader tools to let you follow the people and content you’re interested in and reply to things directly in the reader. I presented a small proof of concept at a recent education conference, for those who’d like to see what that experience looks like today.

Perhaps if more platforms opened up to these ideas and tools, we might be able to return, but with a lot more freedom and flexibility than we had in the nostalgic blogosphere?

Yet, we’ll still be facing the human work of interacting and working together. There are now several magnitudes of order more people online than there were in the privileged days of the blogosphere. We’re still going to need to solve for that. Perhaps if everyone reads and writes from their own home on the web, they’re less likely to desecrate their neighbor’s blog because it sticks to their own identity?

There’s lots of work to be done certainly, but perhaps we’ll get there by expanding things, opening them up, and giving ourselves some more space to communicate?

Domains at Domains

Chris Aldrich — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 04:03:40 +0000

I mentioned it as an anecdotal observation in my talk, so I went back and counted the appearances of online identifiers on the 159 re-mixable badges for the OERxDomains 21 Conference. I counted 91 twitter handles, 15 domain names, and 1 Instagram handle.

There were a couple people who used email addresses. A few people listed multiple twitter handles, and one enterprising person (not me!) listed three domain names.

Because the badges were customizable, people (or their animals and a few organizations) had the individual choice of what text to put on their personal badges.

Hopefully we’ll do better on using domain names at the next domains-related conference.

A Twitter of Our Own at OERxDomains 2021 Conference

Chris Aldrich — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 04:10:06 +0000

The Association of Learning Technology and Reclaim Hosting hosted the OERxDomains 2021 Conference last week.

They’ve just opened up the entire conference program with links to all of the sessions and videos for those who’d like to watch them.

You’ll see my presentation video embedded above. If you’d like you can also watch it in the custom player made for the conference, though I notice that it doesn’t replay the live chat.

Due to scheduling issues beyond my control just before the conference, I had to shorten my hour-long workshop down to a 20 minute talk. I intend to do a couple of separate hands-on workshops at upcoming Domain of Our Own meetups so that people can implement the moving pieces I demonstrate into their own websites. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll let you know when they’re scheduled.

I’m hoping that when the next conference rolls around at least some of us can participate using our own domains and not need to rely on Twitter’s infrastructure.

I posted a link to the slides last week if you’d like to follow along that way and have links to some of the resources. (You should also have access to some of my notes/rough transcript as well as alt-text for some of the images included.) The slides still have some context and links to portions of the original version that got cut out.

For those unaware of the conference or topics, it was two days of great presentations about the topics of Open Education Resources (OER) and A Domain of One’s Own which is focused on giving teachers and students to websites and underlying technology of their own for daily personal and professional use. Those interested in the IndieWeb may particularly find the Domains track enlightening. Others interested in teaching, pedagogy, and publishing will get a lot out of the OER tracks.

Chris Aldrich — Sat, 24 Apr 2021 23:55:29 +0000

car ta·co: noun, /kär/ /ˈtäkō/
1. a taco purchased specifically for eating in the car, often when picking up carry out, usually such that others in the ordering party are unaware of the item’s consumption

Slides for A Twitter of Our Own from OERxDomains 2021

Chris Aldrich — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 19:15:30 +0000

As promised at the conference, you can find the slides with convenient links and other resources for my talk A Twitter of Our Own at OERxDomains21 on Google Slides.

They are also embedded below:

Updates to the Boffo Socko Newsletter

Chris Aldrich — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 23:07:39 +0000

I’d done some previous work to help improve the newsletter that my website sends out. I’ve iterated a bit on that process today.

Hopefully the changes are a well-balanced solution for both my readers and me. One that allows readers to get what they’d like what they’d like and when, and for me to be able to own the relevant data and relationships rather than selling it off or heavily farming it out to one of the newsletter silos like Substack. Hopefully it also cuts down on the manual portions of the problem that I’ve had in the past.

Part of my concern is that, depending on the day, I can be posting just a few items to my website while other days will see 50 or more posts. (It’s amazing how many posts you have when you try to own everything that you post publicly to the web.) Naturally not everyone may be interested in all of my content, and people will have different preferences on how often they receive updates.

New options

To kick off some new options, I’ve updated the email sign up process to allow people to choose some broad categories of content and types they may be interested in receiving. Most of these categories only have a smaller handful of updates within a month, so those indicating some of the specific categories as a preference will only receive them on a monthly basis.

If you’re subscribing to everything, the status updates, the link blog, or portions of the social stream those will be delivered in a weekly newsletter, so readers will get as much as possible without missing out on anything.

I’m starting to collect the preference data for the future, but I’ve also got a beta section of the sign up form to specify the frequency with which you’d like to receive updates. (Note: this isn’t fully functional yet as there are some plumbing issues to handle.)

Folks who are subscribed should start seeing the changes propagate to their subscriptions within the next month.

Caveats and Potential Issues

I’ve been receiving less interaction from those who had previously subscribed to my old WordPress.com website over a decade ago, so I’m leaving those subscribers behind (you should receive an email about this separately). If you find you’re in that old group, just sign up and select the content categories or types you’d like to receive from the new system.

I’m sure there will be some initial bumps and bruises in the transition, so bear with me and don’t hesitate to send your feedback in a way that makes you most comfortable. I’m sure some of my custom posts may not work as well with the newsletter, and hopefully I’ll get those sorted out shortly too.

If you’d like to change your preferences at any time, know that there’s a link at the bottom of the newsletter for changing them. If you would prefer some other custom newsletter with specific categories, content types, or frequency, feel free to email me, and I can set you up with something that most closely meets your specific needs.

Eventually I hope there will be a more streamlined system that will allow people to choose categories, post kinds, and frequency options (daily, weekly, monthly) to suit their specific needs.

Other Subscription Methods

I’m still providing a number of different ways (RSS, email, etc.) of helping people to subscribe to what they’d like to receive, so take a look at all of those if you have other needs. If you have questions or need some custom help for receiving exactly what you’re looking for, don’t hesitate to reach out.

As always, thanks for reading!

To sign up/subscribe, visit our subscription page.

Glenadale Unified allowing students back on campus in a limited schedule

Chris Aldrich — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 16:37:29 +0000

About a year ago Glendale Unified School District (GUSD) returned from a long two week Spring break. The second, unplanned week of vacation was extra preparation time for teachers to get ready to do remote learning in response to the pandemic.

Today, nearly a year later to the day, GUSD is starting to welcome students back to campus. They’ve given the parents the choice to send their children back to campus through the end of the year, presuming there are no flare ups of the coronavirus.

Today they’re dramatically changing their schedule and welcoming back portions of kindergarten through third grade students. Fourth through sixth grades will be invited back in a few weeks.

Students returning to campus are broken up into two groups. One will be on campus on Monday/Tuesday and the other on Thursday/Friday. Everyone will be remote on Wednesdays (presumably with room cleanings between the groups). Synchronous instruction will be from 8:20 AM to about noon and remote, asynchronous instruction will go until about 2:30 PM. About 55-60% of students have apparently opted to be back on campus and that number broken in half will leave about 30% of a grade class in physical attendance for their two days a week.

If I recall correctly, about two weeks ago the CDC changed their guidance for children and decreased the social distance recommendation from 6 feet to 3 feet. I’m not sure if GUSD is following this new recommendation.

Evie’s fourth grade Japanese dual immersion class was broken up between her tortoise (カメ ) group and the cranes (鶴（つる)). They’ve now been reshuffled and renamed the “roomies” and the “zoomies” depending on whether their groups will be attending in person or remotely, respectively. Evie will be a zoomie for the remainder of the school year.

While it might be nice for more socialization and a change in routine, it seems far easier and less stress with our routine to simply stay remote for the balance of the school year. There were likely to be only 15 or so days that she would attend in person given their structure and schedule. Erring on the side of caution, and a bit on convenience, remote seems a better option until the fall when a higher proportion of people are vaccinated.

Hypothes.is as a comment system: Receiving @mentions and notifications for your website

Chris Aldrich — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 21:20:09 +0000

I’ve wanted @mention/Webmention support on Hypothes.is for a long time. I had URL hacked my way into a solution a while back but never wrote about it.

I was reminded today that one can subscribe to an RSS/ATOM feed of annotations on their site (or any site for that matter) using the feed format and replacing the example.org URL with the desired one. Nota bene: the /* at the end makes the query a wildcard to find anything on your site. If you leave it off you’ll only get the annotations on your homepage.


If you’re using Hypothes.is in an off-label use case as a commenting system on your website, this can be invaluable. I recall Tom Critchlow and CJ Eller trying this out in the past.
To go a step further, one can also use this scheme to get a feed of @mentions of their Hypothes.is username too. If I’m not mistaken, based on some preliminary tests, this method should work for finding username both with and without the @ being included.
These are a few interesting tidbits for those who are using Hypothes.is not only for the social annotation functionality, but as a social media site or dovetailing it with their own websites and related workflows.



A reflection on annotations and context at OLC Innovate & Liquid Margins
Chris Aldrich — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 22:28:02 +0000
It’s fascinating to look back on the Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B” that a group of us annotated this morning in the context of exploring Hypothes.is as part of OLC Innovate and Liquid Margins.
Reviewing over some notes, I’m glad I took a moment to annotate the context in which I made my annotations, which are very meta with respect to that context. Others’ annotations were obviously from the context of educators looking at Hughes’ work from the perspective of teachers looking back at an earlier time.
I’ve just gone back and not only re-read the poem, but read through and responded to some of the other annotations asynchronously. The majority of today’s annotations were made synchronously during the session. Others reading and interpreting them may be helped to know which were synchronous or asynchronous and from which contexts people were meeting the text. There were many annotations from prior dates that weren’t in the cohort of those found today. It would be interesting if the Hypothes.is UI had some better means of indicating time periods of annotation.
Is anyone studying these contextual aspects of digital annotation? I’ve come across some scholarship of commonplace books that attempt to contextualize notes within their historic time periods, but most of those attempts don’t have the fidelity of date and timestamps that Hypothes.is does. In fact, many of those attempts have no dates at all other than that they may have been made +/- a decade or two, which tends to cause some context collapse.
Crowdlaaers may provide some structure for studying these sorts of phenomenon: ?url= It provides some time-based tools for viewing annotations to help provide context. Looking at it’s data, I’m particularly struck by how few people today took advantage of the ability to use taxonomies.

As always, it was fun to see and hear about some uses of annotation using Hypothes.is in the wild. Thanks again to Nate Angell, Remi Kalir, Jeremy Dean, and all of the other panelists and participants who spoke so well about how they’re using this tool.


Altadena Library zines and “Books I’ve Loved in 2020”
Chris Aldrich — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 20:57:49 +0000

	
	
	
	I just put a handful of copies of Altadena Library‘s new zine Books I’ve Loved in 2020 into our Little Free Library for the neighborhood to enjoy. I’d gotten a preview copy a week ago and loved it. 
In addition to our neighborhood LFL, you can find it at the local branches of the Altadena Library (they just re-opened for curbside pick up today) and at select Little Free Libraries around Altadena.
If you love zines, they’ve got a collection of others to check out. They’ve also been hosting a regular zine workshop on the third Saturday of the month. You should be able to pick up a zine kit for the next meeting, which I’m hoping to attend. Maybe I’ll put together a zine featuring some of our local neighborhood Little Free Libraries?


A #MeToo Limerick for Valentine’s Day
Chris Aldrich — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 22:21:40 +0000
Harvey loomed to give Mary a kiss.

She bobbed her head left so he’d miss.

He tried his advance yet again.

She hooked with a right to his chin,

then crossed his other cheek with her fist!


A Twitter of Our Own
Chris Aldrich — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 01:48:34 +0000

	
	
	
	A workshop proposal for the Domains Track of OERxDomains21 Conference in April 2021
Corporate social platforms extract a heavy and often hidden price from teachers and students. Lack of privacy, encouraging abuse, context collapse, and surveillance capitalism are a few of the harms we face. They also expose us to a wider variety of publics than we would choose in which to practice and share our learning.
We must take back ownership and control of our content and interactions online (Çelik 2019). This hands-on workshop will help those with domains of their own expand them into healthier and safer communication tools.
This session will be code-free. It’s presented at the level of a person who is able to log into their site, write a post, and publish it.
We’ll outline and install WordPress* plugins (IndieWeb 2021) to allow participants to make the open web their learning network. Participants can use their extended domains in classrooms, with personal and professional learning networks, or in their daily lives. We encourage more technical participants to partner with others for help. Community-based support is available following the conference.
When we’re done, participants should be able to:

– subscribe to each others’ websites;

– read subscriptions in a social reader (Parecki 2018);

– reply to posts by publishing on their domains using open standards (Parecki 2017a);

– send notifications to each other (Aldrich 2018) using open standards (Parecki 2017b).
The session will end with questions and discussion. We’ll focus on how to use our domains in ethical ways that enable an atmosphere of care. We want to ensure this system and its use don’t re-create the toxicity of the platforms it replaces.
Participants will leave with resources for how they might extend their independent network. Our domains can also interact with other social media using these new tools.
* This session will focus on WordPress as an example platform. We’ll provide resources for people using other content management systems. Everyone should be able to follow along, ask questions, and take part, either in real time or with follow up after-the-fact.
To the extent possible, the materials, resources, and video generated will be shared on the author’s domain with a CC0 license. Syndicated copies will be available on the IndieWeb.org community wiki and the Internet Archive.
References
Aldrich, C. (2018) “Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet.” A List Apart. 
Çelik, T. (2019) Take Back Your Web. Beyond Tellerrand 2019. 
IndieWeb. (2021) “Getting Started on WordPress – IndieWeb.” Wiki. [online] Accessed February 9, 2021. 
Parecki, A. (2018) “An IndieWeb Reader: My New Home on the Internet.” [online] Aaron Parecki (blog). 
———. (2017a) “Micropub.” The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [online] 
———. (2017b) “Webmention.” The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). [online] 
License



To the extent possible under law,  Chris Aldrich has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to A Twitter of Our Own: A workshop proposal for the Domains Track of OERxDomains21 Conference in April 2021. This work is published from: United States.


Insurrection aftermath: Don’t absolve yourself
Chris Aldrich — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 19:53:33 +0000
After watching many Republicans on the Sunday morning shows and hearing a few on the radio this morning, I notice that they’re actively preferring only one or two of the three solutions after Wednesday’s insurrectionist coup attempt.
Three options
The three broad options that everyone is talking about:

Trump resigns
25th Amendment removal of Trump
Impeachment in the House possibly followed by conviction in the Senate

Generally Republicans are looking more closely at options one and two (in that order) and then they’re immediately shifting the discussion to the appalling nature of the events themselves.
The important question we need to ask ourselves is why are they preferring resignation or the 25th amendment? The answer comes down to who is actively receiving the blame and who has to actively do the work to make the system function properly.
In option 1, Trump and Trump alone takes the blame and initiates the action. This lets all his Republican supporters off the hook for allowing him the bullying free reign he’s had for more than four years now.
Presently the chance that Trump resigns is hovering around zero because he is so loathe to smear his own reputation or take responsibility for anything. Resignation is too closely associated with the idea of being a “loser” which Trump cannot admit himself to be at any cost.
In option 2, Trump still takes the blame and only a small handful of primarily un-elected leaders needs to take the action.
As we’ve already seen this past week, cabinet members are either still too loyal to Trump, or have chosen to jump ship to save themselves rather than take the necessary proactive action against him.
In option 3, Trump takes the blame, but a large number of people need to take action. While almost all Democrats and a handful of Republicans can easily take this route, some Republicans are loathe to want this option.
In particular, most Republicans won’t want to take this route because it also means that they must take some of the blame for so actively supporting Donald John Trump’s lies and views for so long.
Responsibility
Not a single Republican I’ve seen was willing to take even an iota of responsibility for supporting Trump, his outright lies, racist policies, or insanity for the past four+ years much less the last two months. Two months in which they either actively supported his lies that the election was stolen or supported it with their acquiescence by silence.  They’re still abjectly holding to the belief that the emperor is fully dressed, while only trying to admit that he’s taken off one glove. They may not want to say it but they know better.
We need to be able to admit that the Emperor is naked and that far too many of us are only half dressed at best. We need to ardently press for all three solutions to happen. We also need to advocate for a fourth option that requires sanctions of the members of congress who voted to continue to support the lie even after the insurrection.
To be the Americans we say we are or want to be, we need to hold power to account. We can’t leave the message that a future leader can do the same thing and get away with it. We need to admit our complicity in allowing Trump to pretend to lead us. We cannot absolve ourselves of responsibility.
We can’t absolve ourselves without true penance
If you’re still unsure of why we cannot absolve ourselves (and honestly even if you aren’t), then I highly recommend reading a short Twitter thread/essay from earlier this week by Lili Saintcrow. It’s a highly illustrative parable about what has been going on in America and why it continues.
Her thread starts here:

Let me explain something to those of you who didn’t grow up around violently abusive white supremacists.
*They absolutely do not believe their own bullshit*, but it’s useful for them to pretend they do.
— Lili Saintcrow (@lilithsaintcrow) January 7, 2021

And for those who don’t click through, I’ll excerpt two tweets in the thread which are very important to her searing point:

Domestic abusers, white supremacists, and religious bigots all operate off the same thin but very useful playbook that exploits other people’s politeness and (I’ve got to say it) “civility.”
“Obama was born in Kenya.” “She provoked me, I had to hit her.” “Biden’s followers stormed the Capitol.” “It was Antifa.” “I thought that black child was going to shoot me.” These are all the same species of lie, and they serve the same purpose–to absolve the speaker.

Republicans (and let’s be honest, really all of us) are going to have to individually and collectively do some very hard work here, take responsibility, and stop attempting to absolve ourselves.
Without it, we’re just repeating the mistakes of ending Reconstruction after the Civil War which ushered in the despicable Jim Crow laws and have kept our nation mired in racist ideas and racist policies. If we’re not careful we’ll be heading back to an actual and far more costly Civil War. Let’s take this opportunity to admit our mistakes and actually move forward.
We all deserve better. We all need better. We all require better.
We should all demand better.


Bore Dydd Calan
Chris Aldrich — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 18:44:35 +0000

	
	
	
	This somehow seems appropriate during a pandemic

Dydd calan yw hi heddiw,

Rwy’n dyfod ar eich traws

I ‘mofyn am y geiniog,

Neu grwst, a bara a chaws.

O dewch i’r drws yn siriol

Heb newid dim o’ch gwedd;

Cyn daw dydd calan eto

Bydd llawer yn y bedd.

ᔥ Ronald Hutton in The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (2001-02-01) as an example of a Calennig rhyme from 1950s Aberystwyth.


Automating syndication of reply contexts in Twitter Cards using OGP metacrap and plugins in WordPress
Chris Aldrich — Fri, 25 Dec 2020 09:40:20 +0000

	
	
	
	A Metacrap Problem
It’s metacrap–I know, I know–but I’ve been thinking about easy ways to use Open Graph Protocol meta data to add contextual Twitter cards to some of my content when syndicating posts to Twitter. My goal is to leverage the speed and ease-of-use of Micropub clients while doing as little as possible manually, but achieving as much parity between posts on multiple sites. 
I’m particularly keen to do this to syndicate/share more of the articles I read and post about on my site without adding additional manual work on my own part.
Outline of Some Resources
The Post Kinds plugin for WordPress parses URLs for me and pulls in data to create reply contexts for a variety of posts like bookmarks, reads, watches, listens, etc. Since Post Kinds doesn’t display featured images (yet), I’ve also been using the External Featured Image plugin to display the featured images from the original to add to the reply context of my posts as well. 
In addition to all these I’ve been using the All in One SEO plugin to easily add an SEO layer to posts without having to do much thinking about it. AIOSEO recently upgraded their UI and features in the last year, and yesterday I upgraded to the newest v4.0+. One of the new features it’s got is the ability to add default fields or pull in pre-existing custom fields to output OGP meta data. 
Start of a Solution
So I got the idea that since Post Kinds and External Featured Image plugins are pulling in and displaying the sort of data I’d like to show in Twitter cards, I figured why not use them? While metacrap is a DRY violation, the fact that it’s automated for me and is based on data I’m actually showing visually on my website makes it feel much less dirty. It also has the benefit that it helps make some of my syndicated content look and feel on Twitter, more like it does on my website. This is also a problem since Twitter hampers how much data I can syndicate in a single post.
I’ve still got some issues about how to deal with the Post Kinds data, but after a bit of digging around, I discovered the image URL for External Featured Image plugin is hiding in the _dcms_eufi_img field. So I can make the default Twitter settings in AIOSEO pull the external image by setting Default Post Image Source to Image from Custom Field and set the Post Custom Field Name to _dcms_eufi_img. 
Since a lot of my posts are reads, bookmarks, etc., this works well, but I can easily override the settings for articles or other custom posts which I make less frequently. 
Hopefully I can figure out the settings for Post Kinds to get the rest of the default fields to map across. I’m happy to hear ideas on what field names I’d need to use to get the Post Kinds Name and Summary/Quote fields to map over for the og:title and og:description respectively. Ideally I can manage to get it done without needing to get a subscription to the pro version of AIOSEO which also has support for custom taxonomies which is how Post Kinds works.
Since my theme has relatively solid microformats support, and I have plugin infrastructure to allow easy syndication from my website to Twitter through micropub clients, this last bit for creating Twitter reply contexts helps close some of the loop for me in my syndication workflow while keeping as much context across platforms.
Example
Here’s a visual example of a native post on my site and the corresponding syndicated copy on Twitter. There are some differences, mostly because I don’t have as much control of the appearance on Twitter as I do on my own site, but they’re about as close as I can get them with minimal work.




Non-technical IndieWeb: Fun, Creativity, Community, and “Content”
Chris Aldrich — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 04:46:49 +0000

	
	
	
	
I wish the indieweb had more content that wasn’t about the indieweb

— simulacrum party (@simulacrumparty) December 19, 2020


The hard part of making cool websites isn’t the tech, it’s the content! Of course I fall into the trap of writing a new ssg every six months as well because it’s easier and safer than writing or drawing or playing music or something interesting and exciting

— simulacrum party (@simulacrumparty) December 19, 2020


If possible, attempt to read the word “content” in these posts without the unsavory connotations with which the last couple of years have saddled that word

— simulacrum party (@simulacrumparty) December 19, 2020

I resemble that remark.


–Credit: Rakhim
Um…
Er… I mean…
I resent that remark.  
The point of having a website is putting something interesting on it right?
The IndieWeb wiki does tend toward the technical, but many of us are working toward remedying that. For those who haven’t found them yet, there are some pages around a variety of topics like poetry, crafts, hobbies, music, writing, journalism, education, and a variety of other businesses and use cases. How we don’t have one on art (yet) is beyond me… Hopefully these might help us begin to use our sites instead of incessantly building them, though this can be a happy hobby if you enjoy it.

I have come to suspect that slowly redesigning your website (forever) provides almost exactly the same kind of light absorption & calm satisfaction as knitting or embroidery

— Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) December 13, 2020

If you’ve got an IndieWeb friendly site, why not use it to interact with others? Help aggregate people around other things in which you’re interested. One might interact with the micro.blog community around any of their tagmoji. (I’m personally hoping there will be one for the stationery, pen, and typewriter crowd.) One might also find some community on any of the various stubs (or by creating new stubs) on IndieWeb.xyz. 
For more practical advice and to borrow a proverbial page from the movie Finding Forrester, perhaps reading others’ words and borrowing or replying to them may also help you along. I find that starting and ending everything from my own website means that I’m never at a loss for content to consume or create. Just start a conversation, even if it’s just with yourself. This started out as a short reply, but grew into a longer post aggregating various ideas I’ve had banging around my head this month.
Rachel Syme recently made me think about “old school blogs”, and as interesting as her question was, I would recommend against getting stuck in that framing which can be a trap that limits your creativity. It’s your site, do what you want with it. Don’t make it a single topic. That will make it feel like work to use it.

If you started a niche blog (and I mean old school geocities/Wordpress/blogger blog, not a newsletter) right now, what would it be about? Don’t overthink it.

— rachel syme (@rachsyme) December 8, 2020

The ever-wise Charlie Owen reminds of this and suggests a solution for others reading our content. 

Having said that, I’m gonna update my website soon two that you can filter the RSS feed by tag, eliminating shit you don’t wanna see. 
I can do that because I own my website, unlike on this hellhole where we’re beholden to twitters awfulness. #indieweb

— Charlie Don’t Surf (@sonniesedge) December 19, 2020


Of course if building websites is your passion and you want to make a new one on a new platform every week, that’s cool too. Perhaps you could document the continuing refreshing of the process each time and that could be your content?
Of course if this isn’t enough, I’ll also recommend Matthias Ott‘s advice to Make it Personal. And for those with a more technical bent, Simon Collison has a recent and interesting take on how we might be a bit more creative with our technical skills in This Used to be Our Playground.
In any case, good luck and remember to have some fun!


Crediting your own website when syndicating to Mastodon with WordPress plugins
Chris Aldrich — Sat, 19 Dec 2020 06:24:30 +0000

	
	
	
	I’ve been tinkering around with methods to automatically syndicate (POSSE) content from my personal website to Mastodon. I’ve been working at making a custom plugin which is far from finished. But a test post I made the other day, caught a few people’s attention^[1][2]. 
I was trying to syndicate from my website so that the post on Mastodon would credit my website for the post and link back to my homepage as the application that made the post. You’ll notice at the bottom of the post there’s the post date and a globe icon, which indicates the post is public, followed by my website name ‘BoffoSocko.com’ and details about replies, reposts, and favorites.

I assuredly won’t release a public plugin for WordPress that does this. But since some have asked how I did it, I thought I’d share some of the internals of a few WordPress plugins that one can quickly modify to achieve the same thing.
That I can currently see, there are three plugins in the repository that will allow one to syndicate content to a variety of Mastodon instances. They are Mastodon Autopost, Mastodon Auto Share, and Share on Mastodon. The first two are closely related and essentially replicate the same codebase.
Similar to using Twitter’s API to crosspost, Mastodon is looking for two bits of information when an application is registered: a client name and a website URL. 
Mastodon Autopost and Mastodon Auto Share, both have a file called client.php which define these two variables. 
public function register_app($redirect_uri) {
  $response = $this->_post('/api/v1/apps', array(
    'client_name' => 'Mastodon Share for WordPress',
    'redirect_uris' => $redirect_uri,
    'scopes' => 'write:statuses write:media read:accounts',
    'website' => $this->instance_url
  ));
You can edit this file with a text editor to change the 'client_name' from 'Mastodon Share for WordPress' to 'Anything You Want'. If you’re in a joking mood, maybe change it to 'Twitter'?
To change the URL so that the link on the client_name directs to your website, you’ll want to change the line 'website' => $this->instance_url.
In particular change $this->instance_url to '' where example.com would be your website. I’ll note that $this->instance_url on this line in the original plugin is a bug. If left alone, it points the URL to your home Mastodon instance instead of to the more logical  where the plugin lives. 

If you prefer using Jan Boddez‘ excellent plugin, you’ll want to do something similar, except in that case you’ll want to change a file named class-options-handler.php in the includes folder.
Here you’ll want something like:
'client_name'   => __( 'Example.com' ),
But note that Boddez doesn’t have a similar bug, so the website line
'website' => home_url(),
is already correctly defined so that your website will automatically be linked without any changes to it.
If you’re already using one of these plugins and manually modify them, note that you’ll probably need to re-authorize the plugin so that the changes propagate.


Browser Bookmarklets for Giving Credit
Chris Aldrich — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 06:38:45 +0000
I’ve been thinking more lately about giving credit on my own website, particularly in cases where the context of things I’m reading has some additional context based on where I originally saw them. I’d also like to give people I follow credit as the source by which my own content is aggregated.
Earlier today I tinkered around with some ideas relating to the old Curator’s Code which I revisit from time to time. I outlined some details, data fields, UI, and some pseudo-code to actually build it into a WordPress plugin. Then I thought I ought to check the repository where I discovered that someone had previously made one. Unfortunately it was withdrawn from the repository. I suspect its that they didn’t want to continue to support it moving into the Gutenberg era. (It still works with the classic editor.)
I don’t give credit on my site often enough in large part because it isn’t an easier thing to do when quickly posting some of the smaller bits of content. They say “manual until it hurts“, and doing this has just hurt too much for too long. Toward that end I thought I’d make a couple of quick bookmarklets for cutting and pasting text into my site. It’s not as good as a better custom UI, but it’ll work and could potentially work well for others.
These bookmarklets aren’t any great shakes and perhaps (hopefully?) someone with more JavaScript chops than I have can greatly improve upon them to add or modify some of the bits and automate things a bit better. In particular, I’m sure there’s a way to find the original publication date on a page and pull that data out, but currently I could only figure out how to find the last modified date using document.lastModified because I couldn’t find the other. I’d also prefer to have a way to automatically find the author(s) as well, but JS isn’t my best friend.
Instructions for use
Create two bookmarks in your browser’s bookmark bar. Give them convenient names like “via” and “hat tip” and add the snippets of code respectively into the URL fields. On a site you want to give credit to, highlight the name of the author of the post and click the bookmarklet. You’ll see a pop up for some text which you can then cut and paste into your post to give the credit. You can obviously edit the text if necessary.
If your site supports sending Webmention notifications, then when the post is published, the cited page will get a notification of your post.
Bookmarklet code
Below are snippets of code that the bookmarklets are running (for transparency’s sake).
javascript:(function(){let text=""; if(window.getSelection()!=''){text=window.getSelection().toString()+"\n";}prompt("Press Ctrl+C, Escape","ᔥ "+text+" in "+document.title+" ("+document.lastModified+")
");})()
javascript:(function(){let text=""; if(window.getSelection()!=''){text=window.getSelection().toString()+"\n";}prompt("Press Ctrl+C, Escape","↬ "+text+" in "+document.title+" ("+document.lastModified+")
");})()
Example
Here’s an example of what it looks like on my site:
↬  Maria Popova with input from Tina Roth Eisenberg in curator’s ǝpoɔ (2018-12-07 21:32:53)
Who will you credit?


Some modification ideas to the Curator’s Code Plugin
Chris Aldrich — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:18:44 +0000
I quietly wonder what it would take to modify the zip file for the Curator’s Code Plugin to take advantage of Parse This to input a URL and parse back a small snippet of context for more easily giving credit to posts in the WordPress classic editor?
It looks like it used to be in the repository, but perhaps with the rise of Gutenberg, they opted not to maintain it? 
I follow most of the code there, but I’m thinking too much of the actual output is done via JS with tinyMCE, so maybe I’m missing some of the finer portions. It also needs some tweaks to redirect to maybe the Internet Archive since curatorscode.org no longer exists.
I’m thinking an output closer to the following for each type might still be simple, but provide some additional context, (presuming my microformats aren’t too horrific/mis-nested):
ᔥ AuthorTK TitleTK (2020-TK-TK)

↬ AuthorTK TitleTK (2020-01-29)

Hopefully the via and ht classes also give people enough to latch onto for doing some custom styling of the output if necessary.
With more prevalence of crediting like this, I also wonder how parsers might better display received webmentions for these types of notifications beyond the basic “Sue mentioned this”. Maybe a facepile of avatars under the heading “Inspired by this post”?  Though the way “via” is used in practice, it might also fit under the category of a repost?


Birds of North America Texts and Field Guides
Chris Aldrich — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 07:16:33 +0000

	
	
	
	Spent some time tonight looking at the seven most popular bird books for North America for my memory project. I’m still figuring out how to set up the memory palace for the project though. Lots of data to encode. 
While all are generally solid I’m arranging them for data/information, layout, and image purposes. Here’s the rough order of preference I think I’m going to put them in moving forward:

American Museum of Natural History, Birds of North America (and/or the Western Region) (DK)
The Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America
National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Birds of North America, 
Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America
Sibley Birds West
Golden Field Guides: Birds of North America

I’ll probably buy the top two as I proceed. It looks like DK just published an update to theirs in the last month! In particular, I like the volume of detail of the DK edition and the layout for potentially making memorization easier. 
Now to figure out how to best lay out the various pieces. I’m thinking that Lynne Kelly’s idea of using a Lukasa memory board may be best. But what to fashion it out of and how?


Some thoughts on the HBO Max day-and-date streaming releases during the pandemic
Chris Aldrich — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 05:44:13 +0000
Earlier today Keith Calder asked a intriguing question about the Warner Bros. announcement to release their upcoming slate on HBO Max date-and-date with movie theaters.

I’d love to read a detailed story about how WB renegotiated all of their backend deals to make it possible to release their whole 2021 slate direct to HBO Max and not alienate A-list directors, movie stars, and co-financiers. That’s a very complicated situation.
— Keith Calder (@keithcalder) December 4, 2020


So let’s give it a whirl then, shall we?
Warner Bros. is a primarily a distribution company and to some extent acts like a bank. 
Generally most of their contracts are written to protect themselves and their financial interests at the highest end, not the interests of the producers or production companies that work for them. 
Usually they’re acquiring content from production companies and the acquisition doesn’t tie them down to particular release patterns, marketing dollars, or other preconditions. Producers can consult on some of the decisions, but usually the studio is going to do what it wants.
This is done, in part, because it’s in everyone’s general interest that the picture makes the maximum amount of money. Usually the studio is putting (at least some of) their own money up in advance, so it doesn’t behoove them not to maximize their return.
Production companies, directors, writers, and actors all rely on them having skin in the game. In this case, they’re the ones left physically holding the bag.
With this move, the studio is covering its (and everyone else’s) best interest by attempting to recoup as much as they can. Since they control the release from top to bottom on their own platform all the money goes into their own pockets instead of giving a sliding percentage of it away to so many of the popcorn and carbonated sugar syrup grocery stores that masquerade as movie theaters these days. 
One also needs to keep in mind that it’s quite common for talent contracts to fester for long after the start of principal photography and some never get to the point of receiving wet signatures. I’ve seen dozens of contracts get wet signatures long after their films’ theatrical releases.
So it’s entirely possible that they could be waiting until now to drop the bomb. But what is the talent going to do? They’re not going to fail to show up and support their work, that’s for sure. Everyone knows the business is in the hole and not coming back any time soon.
The finance costs of some of these movies would completely eat the studios alive if they don’t do something. What else can they do? The best they can. Grin, bear it, and keep the gears turning.
And let’s not forget about the total turkeys which can be illustrative. There are many movies that get made and acquired and don’t get a release at all. Sometimes the studio makes the determination that it’s in their interest to sit on a film and never release it because the cost of prints and advertising is just too great.
Here’s a great example. Do you remember the 2000 blockbuster hit The Third Wheel starring Ben Affleck and Luke Wilson?
What?! Never heard of it? Affleck shot it between Reindeer Games and Bounce while starting talks for doing Pearl Harbor for Bruckheimer at Disney.
His star was on the rise after Good Will Hunting and Armageddon and it was generally obvious to Mirimax and the producers (which included Matt Damon and Ben Affleck), that an incredibly mediocre film starring him might potentially end his career or the pairs’ producing careers.
So, what the heck? We only spent a few million on it, so we’ll eat the cost of production and maybe release it in a handful of foreign territories in a cheap dub a few years down the road and no harm, no foul. Right?
But what about all the other crappy movies that come out and tank at the box office? It’s often not until your film has had a test audience screening that the studio truly slots its release date. Any dates prior to that are just flexing to scare the competition. 
After a test screening, the last thing you want to hear is that it’s coming out in late August or February. Studios don’t release movies in those time periods—they escape! Those slots are the kiss-of-death because no one goes to the movies then.
The studio knows that but generally needs to recoup some money. Typically they’re also paying interest on production loans or bridge financing which they can’t sit on forever.
So in an effort to clear the books, they push the movie out with the least amount of P&A so that they can begin bundling their films into all the follow up release windows in hopes that those will at least cover their cost.
If there are law suits after-the-fact, they’ll likely be over the back end deal segments that provide bonuses for talent for box office performance. But guess what? Usually creative finance on the studio’s part is done to prevent these bonuses from being paid out in the first place.
And shame on the agents and attorneys of the talent for not adding in bonus payouts for performance of releases in each window segment of the pictures lifespan. You can bet those clauses will be baked into contracts going forward.
I’ve got some first look and producing deals as well as some acquisition paperwork kicking around the office here, but without looking through them, I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing in those contracts that requires the studio(s) to actually release anything.
Of course it only hurts the studio to buy material and just sit on it, so can you fault them for doing the best they can? 
My guess is that with the givens, they’ll get a massive bump in (recurring–everyone’s favorite) subscription income and it will either mostly or completely cover a large part of the gap. And likely better for their part, it’s harder for talent to audit internal numbers and machinations within a studio to prove that the movie made it to profit levels necessary to pay off points on the back end.
If there is a contractual obligation lurking around somewhere, they’ve always got a force majeure clause in there somewhere that would certainly cover the issues they’re living with.
Some of the more interesting questions relate to the studios’ relationships with exhibitors which generally aren’t owned by them. That may be a slightly harder question, but what are theater owners really going to do? They can’t guarantee the box office turn out that they might have before, and a poor box office turn out is more likely to do irreparable damage to a film’s release in all the subsequent windows. 
Generally with a sliding scale of box office receipts going to the exhibitors, they’re really in the business of selling popcorn which is where they make all their profits, but as we all know, that’s not doing very well for them right now either.
It’s actually more likely in the studio’s interest to pull their films. Their smaller budget releases in January and February are far more likely to overperform by being released during the pandemic to audiences who can pay a premium for them and who may feel a dearth of new entertainment options.
Meanwhile all the parents who couldn’t afford the $100+ for the babysitter and incidentals are likely to appreciate their HBO Max subscription all the more.
But wait! There’s more! I’ve completely buried the lede! Peter Kafka alludes to it in his interview with WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar earlier today, but I suspect he is completely unaware of it. (This is likely why Vox gets the interview in a soft presser and not a senior legal journalist with The Hollywood Reporter or Variety.) For the careful viewers at home, let’s not forget that the 1948 Paramount Consent Decree died quietly earlier in August this year. This essentially makes it much easier for studios to become vertically integrated again. The studios can now own the entirety of the finance, production, distribution, and exhibition chain like they could in the “Golden Era” of Hollywood. If you want to ask questions about something, this is the area to focus on! 
Give it another couple of years and studios will eventually own talent agencies again… Who’s going to be the next Lew Wasserman?
If only we had a President who was also in the entertainment business who could monkey around with this arrangement the way Reagan did…

article | Chris Aldrich

Hall & Oates Concert October 2021 featuring Squeeze at the Hollywood Bowl

Background and the Pandemic

Opening act: Squeeze

Setlist

Main Act: Hall and Oates

Setlist

Band

Brief review

Mudstels: the new rage in car colors

On Note Taking: Putting Ideas into a Crib

An Index for My Digital Commonplace Book

We’re Not All That: High School is America in miniature

Gardens and Streams II: An IndieWebCamp Pop-up Session on Wikis, Digital Gardens, Online Commonplace Books, Zettelkasten and Note Taking

Event Details

Format

Tentative Schedule

Resources

RSVP (optional)

Questions? Concerns? Volunteers?

Social Media, Fast and Slow

Humanity is the medium. Humanity is the message.

Hypothes.is + Obsidian = Hypothesidian for easier note taking and formatting

Hypothes.is + Obsidian

Formatting your notes

Differentiating online variations of the Commonplace Book: Digital Gardens, Wikis, Zettlekasten, Waste Books, Florilegia, and Second Brains

A fluorescence of note taking tools

Delineating Online Forms

Commonplace books

Florilegium

Zettelkästen

Waste books/Sudelbücher

Wikis

Second brain

Digital Gardens

The Future?

Planning for Gardens and Streams II: An IndieWebCamp pop-up session on Wikis, Digital Gardens, online Commonplace Books, and note taking

Course Announcement: The Art of Memory

Jake Reeder’s Return to Cinder site and related Databyss platform

Some brief thoughts on I Annotate 2021 from today

Protected: For the IndieWeb: A method for private posts shared with those who have a shared context

Differential Topology—Two quarter sequence at UCLA Extension for Fall/Winter 2021

An Euclidean Declaration

Creating Internal Backlinks for MediaWiki for Digital Gardeners

Thoughts on Jeet Heer’s Can We Bring Back Blogging?

Domains at Domains

A Twitter of Our Own at OERxDomains 2021 Conference

Slides for A Twitter of Our Own from OERxDomains 2021

Updates to the Boffo Socko Newsletter

New options

Caveats and Potential Issues

Other Subscription Methods

Glenadale Unified allowing students back on campus in a limited schedule

Hypothes.is as a comment system: Receiving @​mentions and notifications for your website

A reflection on annotations and context at OLC Innovate & Liquid Margins

Altadena Library zines and “Books I’ve Loved in 2020”

A #MeToo Limerick for Valentine’s Day

A Twitter of Our Own

A workshop proposal for the Domains Track of OERxDomains21 Conference in April 2021

References

License

Insurrection aftermath: Don’t absolve yourself

Three options

Responsibility

We can’t absolve ourselves without true penance

Bore Dydd Calan

Automating syndication of reply contexts in Twitter Cards using OGP metacrap and plugins in WordPress

A Metacrap Problem

Outline of Some Resources

Start of a Solution

Example

Non-technical IndieWeb: Fun, Creativity, Community, and “Content”

Crediting your own website when syndicating to Mastodon with WordPress plugins

Browser Bookmarklets for Giving Credit

Instructions for use

Bookmarklet code

Example

Some modification ideas to the Curator’s Code Plugin

Birds of North America Texts and Field Guides

Some thoughts on the HBO Max day-and-date streaming releases during the pandemic

Hypothes.is as a comment system: Receiving @mentions and notifications for your website