Also: Neat Hobby! is ten years old this year! I'll have to write something about it later.
Posted September 3, 2024
Blog
Neat Hobby! presents: Copilot
Unfurling
I've been building this website with Eleventy on Netlify for awhile now and I love it. That said, I've started to miss having dynamic features. So I went spelunking in the cold, haunted depths of NPM to see what eyeless abyssal creatures (i.e. possessed, sleep-deprived full-stack devs) have already built for me.
Here's a feature that I've wanted for a long time: link unfurling! I've always liked those rich preview cards you see when you share links on just about any social media app. Thank you Dave and Sara!
(These might look like a mess in your feed reader, so I suggest visiting my website directly if you're using one. Yes, you there, reading this right now with a feed reader.)
I did some light hacking on a copy of this code to create a fallback format when data like images are missing.
Here are a few good examples:
David Darnes - Designer, Front-end Developer & Writer specialising in Design Systems, Eleventy, Ghost & Jamstack
Designer, Front-end Developer & Writer specialising in Design Systems, Eleventy, Ghost & Jamstack
darn.es
Here are a few without images:
Importing Eleventy content into WordPress
Related to redoing this blog, I thought I’d quickly share how I exported all of my 11ty content and imported it into WordPress. Steps First up, I installed a fresh copy of WordPress and cleaned out the default posts, pages and comments. Then, in the existing Eleventy project, I added the following page—which I named […]
Andy Bell
Patrick and I used to play together in Explone and Kirby Krackle. I recently helped with a revamp of his Squarespace website.
Patrick Porter
Patrick Porter
Posted August 29, 2024
Summer notes
It's summer, and I find myself with some downtime, which usually means overthinking.
Work
Nearly a year ago I observed the 20th anniversary of my day job. Neat! And then several months later my position was eliminated in a gigantic re-org. I was given some time to find a new position in the company, but after 20 years and with the support of good friends and loved ones, I decided to just exit.
So I'm in the middle of a gap year I feel exceptionally fortunate to be able to take. It is...a very strange feeling sometimes.
I've been spending my time catching up with the state of web development outside of the silo of a Big Tech Company. There is so much cool stuff happening in the front-end space these days and I've been having fun working on personal projects and reconnecting with the work that drew me to the web in the first place.
Whatever my next career move might be, I'm aiming for something with a little more autonomy. Self-employed? I used to think I didn't have the knack for that, but these days I'm feeling the curiousity and confidence to figure it out. It also helps to have had, uh, a quarter-century of experience building stuff.
Also, the tech interviewing space has become broken and gross, and I say that as someone who's been on both sides of the process.
Music
There is no music! Since the release of the Car Trouble album and the handful of follow-up singles, I haven't written squat. There are some unreleased cover songs I recorded with Nelson and Craig over a year ago, but I really dislike my vocal performance on those and I think I'd have to fundamentally change the nature of my voice to be satisfied.
I also have the remnants of a follow-up Car Trouble EP, maybe about four new songs, scattered about. I'd like to finish those someday. But honestly, my songwriting neurons are thoroughly fried, and I'm being pulled more and more toward comics, which don't require me to go anywhere, lug gear around, or stay out past 1 A.M. to get my bass rig that I loaned to the other bands back.
On the bright side, I've been playing bass a lot and I'm very, very good now.
I do fantasize about finding a perfect gig on Craigslist, which at this point would be an all-middle-aged Phil Collins tribute.
Comics
I've been doing more comics than ever and you should join my newsletter!
Here's why: subscribers are getting a lot more stuff than what I post of the website. They're getting extra comics, one-panel gag comics, peeks at animation projects I'm working on, and access to a hidden blog. They also get to see comics at least a week before everyone else.
Here's another reason: social media is a lousy way to distribute comics, or any other art. You know this. I know this. Everyone knows this. It's true that algorithms hide content people actually want to see. But also? Thanks to all the noise created by AI-generated trash, policital jerks, and ads ads ads, people are just tuning out social media.
If you like an artist's work, you really should try to follow them off of social media, even if you're not ready to give them money. Go find a few artists you love and show them that love: sign up for newsletters, share links to their work, bookmark their websites, or just tell someone else!
Animation!
I am turning a small number of Neat Hobby! comics into animated shorts! I'm learning to do this through Clip Studio Paint's built-in animation tools. I haven't posted anything public yet (which is why you should join the newsletter! ) but if you subscribe to my YouTube channel you'll see them the moment they go up.
This is by far the most fun and satisfying thing I'm working on. The perfect intersection of my interests: drawing, music, voice acting, video. I want to do 8-10 of these by the end of 2024.
AI
I try to keep an open mind about it, but AI really does look like a bubble that's gonna pop before it can produce anything of broad value. That's okay, we did that with the dotcom stuff too.
Big Tech Companies had a nice sprint during Covid, but now that's over, innovation has plateaued and they're out of ideas. But because constant growth is the expectation, we get layoffs, more ads, price hikes, and Hail Mary attempts to shove AI into things that worked perfectly well without it.
Which sucks, because I actually think there's some real utility! I have a short list of things I'd want AI to do for me personally, and none of them should require god-level intelligence or a dedicated power grid.
That Thing in November
I don't even know why this is a question! But if there's any doubt, here's a handy rubric:
- How did you feel when the US Supreme Court threw out Roe?
- How did you feel as you watched January 6 happen in real time?
- Do you want more of that?
There's your answer!
Posted August 5, 2024
Blogging returns...as email!
It pains me to see a lot of creative folks in my sphere still using Substack, but I think Substack has been wildly successful getting folks back into blogging by building it primarily around email instead of RSS. Content-wise there's no meaningful difference between a blog and a newsletter, and an online archive of newsletters can still leverage all the features of a classic weblog. To me, this is still blogging even if the organizing principle has changed.
I'm happy to see Ghost, Beehiv, and Buttondown jump into the arena with similar approaches and maybe stronger moral fiber (I guess we'll see).
Blogging was never going to "return" so long as we had to explain RSS and feed readers. That's a solved problem now. Now we need more people blogging instead of heading straight for the next big social media silo.
Posted May 6, 2024
Autumnal farm visit report 2023
We've done a few.
Posted October 15, 2023
Social media notes
Bluesky
- frantic, desperate shitposting
- no gifs
- have no idea what people are talking about
- most there to follow Darth?
Threads
- exciting as a dishrag
- no main characters
- is Meta
X
- the derelict spaceship from Event Horizon
Tumblr (reborn)
- best-in-class posting UX, hands down
- nested reblogs still weird
Post / Hive / Spoutible
- no one is talking about these anymore so :shrug:
Mastodon
- these folks know PHP
- your instance's days are numbered
- where I originally posted this
Posted October 14, 2023
Anniversaries
Just a few notable things!
Twenty years ago this past July, singer-songwriter Shannon Gunn and I, under the moniker Pet Rock Star^S, co-wrote two folkpop songs over 24 hours while being on separate US coasts as part of the 2003 Blogathon charity event. Last month I rescued the original blog with all of the song snippets and lyric clips from the Wayback Machine. Special thanks to Phil Ringnalda for hosting the audio for over two decades! Or maybe they just forgot?
Also in July but 11 years ago, Jerin Falkner and I released the first Kin to Stars track, "Hello Ohio." Once every so often I'll go back and listen to our small song catalog and pine for the pre-2016 years.
Just one year ago this week: Car Trouble! The new record! Which I'd been working on since at least 2013. Alas, I parked the Car Trouble live band indefinitely, awaiting a future date when I feel safe going back into music venues. I still love this record and listen to it several times a month. I take it as a good sign when I don't get tired of my own tunes.
And finally, this August marks 20 years living in Seattle, and 20 years at my day job. Surprise! I have a day job. I've always had a day job. To stick with it for 20 years though, feels...weird. Sometimes I look around and I feel like a time traveller.
I have no wisdom to share. Let's just attribute it to luck, and an extremely high tolerance for bullshit.
Posted August 16, 2023
Lance Reddick
New Car Trouble single: Suburban Girl
You can't improve what's already perfect, so if you're going to cover a perfect pop song, at least strive to do it justice, right?
Before his tenure with Guided By Voices and Nada Surf, guitarist Doug Gillard launched his own Cleveland-based rock outfit called Gem. Gem released their album Hexed in 1994 and the only major FM station to have a local music show put the single "Suburban Girl" into rotation.
I'm a few years younger than Gillard and was also kicking around the NE Ohio area playing in bands around that time (we've never met). From the first listen, "Suburban Girl" lodged itself deep in my brain. There's the droll lyrics about being impressed by your girlfriend's dad's lawn. There's the not-quite deadpan delivery. The guitars that feel like summer heat radiating off the pavement as you kill time before your evening shift. There's just something very midwest about the whole thing. Power pop from the land of Pere Ubu and Cobra Verde.
So, this song, stuck in my brain for almost 30 years.
And then, in 2020, while working on Car Trouble songs, I made a demo. And I just kept messing with it for another two years, poking at it, putting my own spin on it and finally pulling Patrick (from Explone, you know that by now) in last year to cut a most worthy guitar solo.
You can't improve what's already perfect. Did we do it justice? I'd like to think so! Please enjoy our version of "Suburban Girl" by Gem, now available on your favorite streaming service. And thank you, Mr. Gillard, for the 3-minute time machine. Ohio remembers!
Posted March 13, 2023
New release: The Analog Kid!
There's a new single over at the Car Trouble website: a loud, pop-punked-up cover of "The Analog Kid" by Rush. I've written about this band's role in my life, and when (drummer/audio engineer) Don invited Pat and myself over to his studio to record this tune, it just seemed like a fun idea. Pat and I took turns singing verse and chorus, and Don mixed and mastered the result you'll hear below.
A confession: I played this bass part with a pick, which may seem like sacrilege, but let me assure you it's just as difficult to play with a pick as with fingers.
There was never a plan to release it, but we almost did in 2020 when Neil Peart passed. Then two years later I had the idea to put it out as a Car Trouble single. I mean, why sit on this? So Pat and Don are now offically ad honorem members of Car Trouble.
Please enjoy our cover of "The Analog Kid." Now available at all your favorite streaming services.
Posted February 27, 2023