As I mentioned earlier I'm working on some short animated versions of my comics. Here's one I did for Halloween, and it's viewable to everyone!
In Japanese folklore, yūrei are ghosts of the Grudge/Ringu variety and they’re usually really mad about it.
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Posted October 2, 2024
Frodo, you eediot!
NOTE: some of you might wonder why Frodo is visible here since he's wearing the One Ring and not just holding it. Here's why:
Posted September 25, 2024
Perusing Lynn Fisher's excellent website I came across her list of these she'd want from job.
In the last three years I’ve worked for three very different companies. This year the tech industry is laying off thousands. I’ve been thinking a lot about jobs. In rougher times it feels risky to ask a lot from your job, but we should. Especially now. So here’s an unordered, incomplete list of things I want from a job.
I would like these too, please. And I'd add the following:
If I have to have to a job, this is what I want it to offer me.
lynnandtonic.com
Posted September 24, 2024
Also: Neat Hobby! is ten years old this year! I'll have to write something about it later.
Posted September 3, 2024
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:
Designer, Front-end Developer & Writer specialising in Design Systems, Eleventy, Ghost & Jamstack
darn.es
Here are a few without images:
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
Posted August 29, 2024
It's summer, and I find myself with some downtime, which usually means overthinking.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I don't even know why this is a question! But if there's any doubt, here's a handy rubric:
There's your answer!
Posted August 5, 2024
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
We've done a few.
Posted October 15, 2023
Bluesky
Threads
X
Tumblr (reborn)
Post / Hive / Spoutible
Mastodon
Posted October 14, 2023
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