Thursday, 28 March 2024

Random Thread: Spring 2023 to ???

The Seasons
A blog for all seasons.

Comments RSS TrackBack 22 comments

  • 1

    Piggy

    in March 20th, 2023 @ 11:05

    First post!!! :grin:

    Pie 3
    Squid 2

  • 2

    Tesseract

    in May 12th, 2023 @ 13:58

    Hey there, Piggy and Robert and anyone else who still happens to stumble on through. I’ve been thinking about you guys a lot lately as I find myself back in a real internet community for the first time in… since whenever I was last active on here, really.

    Said internet community is a fan discord for a Critical Role ship, for the curious. I found my way into CR via TAZ a few years back, got really into D&D as a result and now play in a couple of campaigns, and the past year or so I’ve gotten back into writing fanfiction in a big way. It’s been a great creative outlet—I was always sort of gun-shy about really trying my hand at writing fiction, despite the fact that I’m now editing it professionally, and I’m having a blast.

    But anyway, finding myself chatting with wonderful faceless strangers has me feeling pretty nostalgic for my first internet home. You guys meant, and still mean, a lot to me, although it’s been ages since I’ve been in touch with anyone. I have a lot of really fond memories on this site. I learned a lot here about people, and perspectives, and communication, and community; you guys were among the first I told about my first kiss when I was fourteen and among the first I came out to when I was eighteen; I felt nurtured in my nerdery and always welcomed and supported. It’s absolutely wild to me how much time has passed, and maybe even wilder that this site is still quietly sitting here, waiting for us all to swing back by.

    The requisite life updates: still living in Brooklyn, still working in book publishing, still playing my oboe and saxophone when I can (have been participating on and off in a marching and symphonic band). My childhood dog died at 17 early in the pandemic and my parents recently got a new puppy. We adore each other. I got really into embroidery during COVID, plus the aforementioned D&D and the fanfiction writing, and I’ve been trying to embrace creative audacity, i.e. brute forcing my way through crafts like making cosplay pieces by leatherwork or refinishing bookshelves despite not knowing what I’m doing. Generally it works. :) I changed employers last summer and am liking my new job much better than the old—same kind of work, different boss, very welcome change of pace. I now live with my lovely girlfriend, who I’ve been dating for four and a half years. We are, and I am, very happy.

    Much love to you all, and anyone who knows how to find me on other social media, please never hesitate to reach out. It’s nice to see what folks are up to. In the meantime, I’ll try to remember to swing back by here sooner rather than later. <3

    Pie 5
    Squid 0

    • 2.1

      Piggy

      in May 15th, 2023 @ 13:33

      Hello there, Tess! Welcome home. It’s good to hear you’re doing well. I’m surprised that you think the site is sitting here “quietly”, when the wungs have been working so tirelessly on their “Oops! All Cannons” arrangement of the 1812 Overture over in the tearoom, but either way, here we are. I’ll definitely second the sentiment about people, perspectives, communication, and community. So much of what I now am and believe I can trace back, in large part, to the people here and our conversations together. If I hadn’t learned here what I did learn here, I can’t fathom where else I would have learned it, and probably I wouldn’t’ve.

      Happy early birthday, by the way. Will you be having cake or pie? :arrow:

      Pie 2
      Squid 0

    • 2.2

      Robert Coontz (Administrator)

      in May 25th, 2023 @ 13:44

      Hello, Tesseract! How is life in n-space?

      Pie 1
      Squid 0

  • 3

    Robert Coontz (Administrator)

    in June 11th, 2023 @ 20:35

    I feel a tremor in the Force. Could Keiffer be in the vicinity?

    Pie 0
    Squid 0

  • 4

    gimanator

    in August 24th, 2023 @ 10:37

    I’m back for the latest dispatch! I was mistaken about two things: I thought this post would be about two months earlier and I thought I would have finished all the books I committed to reading. Well, sic semper the best laid plans. At the very least, it’s not such a long hiatus and I did make it through two of the books I outright planned, plus a handful of others. Life on the Mississippi, alas, still waits behind another 80 pages of Islamic history. Soon!

    The coding boot camp mentioned before went about exactly as planned and was definitely the largest impact event of the last 5 months. Exhausting, all-consuming, helpful for the curriculum/alumni network that let one learn on their own (isn’t that always how good education goes?) and the opportunity to work on large(r) projects with teams of other engineers, less helpful for the lacking expertise of the instructors (as I assumed going in). On the whole, seemingly pretty worthwhile! Thanks to previous study I enjoyed a relative facility with the material and contributed a bit to teaching my peers.

    Maybe most unexpected were the demographics. We lined up fairly well with averages: age, probably just north of 30; gender: more balanced than the tech average, but still skewed heavily male. Mainly, I didn’t expect so many people with medical backgrounds! There are some things I should have learned from enrollment in conservatory, too. Namely, from a base rate you’re likely to end up at the institution that has most recently invested in advertising and a cohort expansion. Extrapolate to personality and life circumstances accordingly. Regardless of background, we’re there because our previous life course didn’t pan out and we’re willing to shoot for a shortcut; I think we all quietly nursed a fantasy that enrollment would bring a job without the usual stresses of the hunt. As the market has cooled, I’ve heard enrollment has dropped sharply in the program, which means we were on the very tail end of a bubble.

    I’m now ten weeks into job searching — expected for a typical search and certainly typical for a season of a job market flooded by laid off engineers and scant startup funds. Still, job applications as a full time job are exhausting. At its best, I have a totally flexible schedule to begin applications at 7 and then go for a hike a little after noon with bonus time to read textbooks! All too often, though, meeting the quota I’ve set for myself takes all the energy I have. I don’t blame my peers with whom I’ve lost contact — it’s hard not to get depressed after the umpteenth blank rejection! It helps to remember that software engineering skills are a kind of superpower I’ve been granted: if I can imagine some software, I can probably build it given enough time to puzzle out the details. That’s what I try to do around the periphery; why would you not exercise that ability?

    I, Robot was decidedly a worthwhile reread. There was a bit of clunkiness to it (weird to see language firmly from the 40s and 50s in a sci-fi book), but some of the failings were more relevant than I realized. Like you pointed to, Piggy, some of it has resurfaced in modern conversations. Asimov treats robot functioning with a lot of hand waving; there’s a lot involving assumptions that certain behavior would be perfected or proven without any gesturing as to why. Normally I’d chalk that up to poorly realized fiction …if that wasn’t exactly what some modern commentators also do today. I recently read an account of a hypothetical future that read like a retelling of “The Evitable Conflict”. I can’t exactly call it prescience, but a lot of the similarity comes down to the opacity of a linguistic interaction layer. Maybe something about the presence of a veil obscuring inner workings inspires us to read heavily into them — for Asimov, it seems to be the assumption of perfection; for others today, I guess it involves extrapolating out LLMs to human-level consciousness. I sometimes worry that I’m missing something obvious when I hear the AI doomsday scenarios of the last decade — maybe I just haven’t researched enough (if people have proven game-theoretic optima that involve certain outcomes, after all…). I, Robot makes me think I can attribute at least a little of their thinking to the same patterns in Asimov’s thinking.

    Another recent read that made an impression was the first in Knausgaard’s horribly named series. The book is one of those bloated types that has so much scope you can’t fault it for being writing about writing at times — and usually, those are some of the strongest sections. It’s not what the book is about, since the book is about all sorts of things, but I really appreciated a kind of core thesis that the strength of writing comes from reproducing the atmosphere of a moment, especially down to minute details that one notices. Probably not universally true. Still, there are a lot of descriptions that read back as experiences I know but have never seen on the page.

    A final thought on this one: on a recent shopping errand a teen girl walking with her father in the grocery spontaneously offered me a rose out of the bundle she was holding. A very very brief interaction. I’m left speculating that the point of buying a bundle in the first place was to offer them to strangers? It seems unlikely it was nothing but a one-off. Or if it was, it’s still pleasant: a very trusting gesture towards the world. I’ve done a bit of trying to emulate that attitude since, but I don’t wear it as naturally. Mostly just more smiling at strangers and occasionally speaking to them. I’d like to get to that point, though, where I’m improving strangers’ days as much as she did mine.

    Pie 2
    Squid 0

  • 5

    Piggy

    in November 7th, 2023 @ 08:34

    I’ve realized that since my employer finally made me take a company laptop a few months ago, after a few years of using my personal computer to work from home, I haven’t been opening MuseBlog every day like I usually do. I have some RSS feeds set up to notify me of any new comments, but it’s important to me that I actually come here. So here I am, confessing my self-defined sin. I still harbor fantasies of discovering that one of my acquaintances is actually an old friend from here, masquerading under a paperwork name, but I’m mostly content to have known all of you as much as I do for as long as I have. The prospect of another visit to DC seems distant given my present responsibilities, but if ever the opportunity arises, Robert, I’ll certainly be meeting you for lunch again. Your Great Books of the Western World set holds pride of place on a bookshelf unto itself in our parlor, reachable without leaving my reading chair.

    Did you have any luck, good or bad, in the job-hunting operation, Man-Gator? The prospect of undergoing that has helped me look past any small complaints I may have about my current job.

    Pie 0
    Squid 0

    • 5.1

      gimanator

      in November 10th, 2023 @ 23:22

      Goodness, that’s an anagram I haven’t seen in a long while!

      I’ve been watching for your resurfacing, Piggy. I even (briefly) wondered if the site outage could have spooked you–in a more sober moment I’m remembering it would take something much stronger to keep you away. I’m surprised using an RSS feed didn’t occur to me earlier. But, then again, losing the anticipation of looking at the top of the recent comments means a seriously deficient experience, I think.

      Alas, I seem to have entered a season of doldrums on the job hunt. We’re well up into the hundreds of applications now, leaving me with the impression there’s simply a mismatch between what I have to offer and what employers are seeking. Part of the torpor, I know, is self-imposed; there are untapped resources and a level of active desperation I have yet to rise (or sink?) to. I rarely email hiring managers directly to toot my own horn, for example. For that I blame my quiet fear that my horn isn’t yet worth tooting–emphasis on the yet.

      From the last several months, I found my way to a single interview. It was a referral to an internship meant for college students, and one from a markedly different world (corporate OOP-types) than my study of web frameworks and quick iteration. Technical questions were brief and generally laughably easy, but I had a hard time explaining some simple terms I had seldom (or never) encountered. Evidently what I thought was a reasonably good impression wasn’t. Coming from from a program where the rare graduate jumps into a senior role directly, flopping out of a referred internship interview was a pretty unpleasant emotional blow. On the more positive side, one of the interviewers was happy to provide feedback–against protocol–about where I could improve. So for the next while I’m on a schedule I’ve set myself to build and deploy something addressing those lacunae. I frequently ask myself, “what would somebody who’s notably extraordinary do?” and then try to work towards that as a starting point. I imagine it to involve things like meaningful improvements to database implementations, compilers, or an OS (or building some from scratch, which is the more realistic goal), but that will wait a little longer. For now, it’s just a product with a more involved architecture than I’m used to and teaching myself Java.

      What are the complaints about the job, out of curiosity? And how did that refactoring/generalizing project from March pan out?

      Pie 0
      Squid 0

  • 6

    gimanator

    in November 27th, 2023 @ 20:33

    Now that I’m here, I also have a long overdue thanks for the recommendation of Life on the Mississippi: it was the perfect suggestion. It had been a long while since I’d last lead Twain and a couple of things stood out to me. I had forgotten how flowery his writing could be. It was unexpectedly quite beautiful, in fact, and was part of the reminder of historical parallels. That is, I think of the American South as a place/time very distinct from the world of Victorian literature (particularly the work of Tennyson and his ilk), but both came out of the same inherited corpus and tradition. Very interesting to hear Twain’s opprobrium extend to that very stuff which apparently populated many southern coffee tables (also surprising, though it probably shouldn’t have been, just how consistently scathing all of his writing was).

    At the other extreme, the violence shocked me–both in the local stories Twain relished retelling or what he and his peers idolized as boys. It reminds me of the universality of (some) experience: funny (and a little unfortunate) that the more grisly passages of the pie wars were children performing as they ever have.

    The book absolutely captured the tiny pieces of a life defined by another world and its restrictions. And for the claims about being overpolished, I was pleased to discover the patchwork structure of the book–geology to personal history to travelogue isn’t a sequence I’d expect to find anywhere else!

    As a bonus, I had forgotten in which chapter Ben Coontz appeared and didn’t realize it was towards the end; I spent nearly the whole book expecting to encounter him on the next page.

    ;;

    In other reading, I passed through Kripke’s Naming and Necessity a little while back. It’s the sort of philosophy that veers dangerously close to merely discussing the fuzziness of human language while thinking it’s describing something profound about reality. Most of it has to do with how comfortable/uncomfortable we should be with the necessity of essentialism when identifying people, objects, and intents in logical statements (without it, it turns out it’s hard to be certain what exactly you’re talking about), accompanied by a disquisition on determinism by another name (how many truths of the world ‘necessarily’ follow from other known truths, how many remain ambiguous)–here, the issue seems to be that what Kripke deems a ‘necessary’ truth is totally arbitrary and mostly justified by scientific hindsight. So, little recommendation from me on the actual core of the book.

    But–it did prompt a few interesting questions in the margins. In particular, I’m now curious to know what a sufficient ‘core’ of a logical system is. Said another way, what set of axioms would be sufficient to recreate everything else? That, I hope, may be addressed when I finally make it to reading about ZFC. More broadly, I’m curious if there’s a predictable bound/lack of bound to the amount of data that needs to be collected before a deterministic system can be predicted. I know basically nothing about chaos theory, but my limited understanding is that it predicts near complete knowledge is a necessary bound. Another still, which is maybe too topically interested in neural networks: if the quality of a network’s output is always bounded by the quality of the training input, what are the laws of information loss? In other words, how much approximation (or tuning of nodes according to probability) is enough to recreate the ‘real’ pattern it was sourced from? Is that a known threshold? I assume there must be a model out there in which quantity of observations and weight ascribed to each observation both act as fidelity coefficients, for lack of a better description.

    Pie 0
    Squid 0

  • 7

    Piggy

    in November 27th, 2023 @ 23:30

    I ought to pick out some Twain to read myself. One of my half-treasured possessions is a dark green hardback set of his works published in the 1930s or so that I took from my grandfather’s basement after he passed away. His biography of Joan of Arc has been on my list for a while–maybe I’ll look at that one.

    As for complaints about my job, I guess they’d mostly revolve around the management, which has its pros and cons. The company was a literal “started in the founder’s basement in the ’90s” job, still entirely owned and run by that founder. As it’s grown fairly quickly, for the industry, in the last decade or so, it’s maintained that sort of flat hierarchy, without much in the way of formal job titles and responsibilities. On the one hand, that’s meant that I’ve been able to sort of define my own position and find what I like to do and what I’m good at. I’ve found that I’m quite good at a certain type of “soft” leadership, driving large and long-term work without ever actually telling anyone what to do or how to do it. I also adopted DevOps-ish work purely on the basis that no one else was doing it and I was annoyed at the inefficiencies I saw, and I really enjoy tinkering with that when I get the chance. On the other hand, it’s rarely clear what the most important or urgent work is, and communication and coordination between different areas of the software department is pretty poor. It’s very common for one team to work for a few months on some feature, only to learn after they’re done that the same feature has already been implemented in some other team. There’s also a lot of pressure to get new features out as quickly as possible so the company can be first-to-market, without much discipline about regression testing or paying down technical debt. As I haven’t worked anywhere else, I don’t have other experience to compare this to, but those would be my biggest basic complaints.

    What else have I been up to lately…. A lot of my day-to-day thought is still taken up by autism and ADHD and neurodiversity, I guess, regarding both myself and the rest of my family. My sister and her husband and two sons were in town for a couple weeks for Thanksgiving, and it was hard to see her and her husband, as well as my parents, constantly scolding their older son, who I’m sure is ADHD and possibly autistic, for fidgeting in his seat at the table or running around the house. My wife and I are always trying to find ways of allowing our kids, especially our oldest, to fidget and stim and self-regulate as much as possible, and hearing my nephew get told to “sit on [his] bottom” thirty times per meal was kind of heartbreaking when we’ve gone through four high chairs trying to find one that will let our son move more. I don’t know if or how to say something, though. The most I did was sending my sister a link to the sensory/chewy toys we like, and one time when my temper got the best of me and I snapped at my mom that she didn’t have to be angry at her grandkids all the time.

    Other than that, I’m still spending most or all of my free time on homelab/smart home stuff, which has been my specialest interest for the last couple years. Our oldest will not sleep without the ocean sounds specifically from the Google assistant, which fails if the internet ever goes down in the middle of the night. (He will not accept any other ocean sounds.) Last week, though, I found a link to download that exact sound file, so I’ve been tweaking some automations to play that from the local network instead, recovering gracefully if anything goes wrong and the like. And today, while messing around with the Bluetooth-connected Ember coffee mug I splurged on for Black Friday, I got sucked into learning some more advanced Jinja, which is a kind of cursed and frustrating templating engine.

    I’m trying to think of another book recommendation…. Something about philosophy and human language reminded me of Gerald Murnane’s A Million Windows. I only read it once, five or six years ago, and I don’t remember all that much about it, so I don’t know if I can really say I recommend it, but I do remember that I enjoyed it and that it was one of the more unusual books I’ve read. All I’m reading currently is Katherine May’s Wintering, as well as Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes for the third time. I guess I’m also working through The Complete Peanuts as I buy more of the volumes, which appear to be becoming unavailable, and so I want to get them all bought while I still can.

    Pie 0
    Squid 0

  • 8

    Piggy

    in December 27th, 2023 @ 12:59

    Well, today marks my 17th ‘Blogiversary. Somehow that number, anything less than my current age, sounds too small, as though my self and my MuseBlog self are identical; but I guess there really was a period of time in my life before MuseBlog. What a boring few years that must have been! The wungs have cake and punch in the tearoom for anyone that wants to celebrate with me.

    Pie 1
    Squid 0

  • 9

    ZNZ

    in January 4th, 2024 @ 16:14

    I’m not sure exactly how I ended up back here, but I was so pleasantly surprised to see posts as recent as these last! It makes me happy to think of you guys all out there in the world, and of people occasionally still swinging through here. I’m doing relatively well. I… hm. I often feel embarrassed to even say hello to people I haven’t seen or spoken to in a long time, because of a strong feeling that I haven’t done anything very impressive any time recently, or don’t have anything much to show for myself. But at least I’m getting more able to catch that the resultant avoidance isn’t a helpful pattern, and that the embarrassment is worth pushing through–and to recognize that the fondness with which I think of old friends isn’t dependent on their/your being able to report on impressive achievements.

    Actual life updates. Moved a lot right after university. Had a fairly dramatic mid-pandemic nervous breakdown; in a lot of ways I’m still recovering from that. Have now settled down somewhat living with good friends in Tennessee, working a reasonably agreeable retail job (local chain of mid-sized grocery stores) where they let me listen to audiobooks and I get on well with all my coworkers. Haven’t been reading as much as I want to since school, but I started going to the movies a lot in the past couple of years and that’s been very good for me, even if I still feel very much a pseud thinking of myself as some kind of “film person.”

    Also I transitioned! Or, came out, first as nonbinary and then as a trans man, and am transitioning. I’m a little more than eighteen months on HRT now, and this past August I had top surgery, which is wild to think about and which changed my life very much for the better; I feel more like a human being than I have maybe ever, or since I was a small child. My other big hobby of the past several years is cycling, and I used to tell people that I loved riding a bicycle because most of the time I felt that I was either completely disconnected from my body or I was inside my body in a way that felt like being trapped, and cycling was the only time that I felt my consciousness settled inside my body in a positive and productive way. I still love my bike, but since transition I don’t need my bike to access that kind of relationship to physicality. I find myself getting there all the time.

    Pie 3
    Squid 0

    • 9.1

      ibcf

      in January 10th, 2024 @ 14:36

      Same problem has kept me away like a pool of flesh eating bacteria, ha. Never mind what I’ve had to show for myself since; the ignominy of the nonsense I put out while I *was* here is too much to bear. But it’s a part of my life whether I like it or not, and like you said (to paraphrase) you gotta look your shame in the eye and punch it in the face. That’s why I keep crawling back every so often. Congratulations on your transition by the way! I don’t think we knew each other too well back in the day but you seem like a cool person. Are you on any social media these days? I’m on discord and the website formerly known as twitter under the same name if you ever want to stop by for a chat about movies, especially if they’re animated. (That goes for the rest of you too!)

      As for my own life updates: came down with Hodgkin’s lymphoma a couple times. Got chemo and a bone marrow transplant, still fortunately in remission. Of all the cancers to get it’s one of the least worst (apart from skin cancers and whatnot). Nice excuse from work and better than lung cancer and the dentist cause no one says it’s your fault. Wouldn’t recommend it in general though.

      Went down to LA to visit my grandma a few months ago and the trip unexpectedly bloomed into a culmination of my lifelong animation obsession. Got serendipitous invites to both a tour of the Roy E. Disney animation building in Burbank and an (entirely unrelated) visit with a couple professional animation buddies in Little Tokyo. Not for an animation job or anything; turns out animation is hard and making a living in it is even harder. Most significant outcome is I got to eat takoyaki for the first time (not bad, but less flavorful than I’d imagined). The Disney animation building is of course grandly designed–topped with a giant Mickey sorcerer hat–and the hallways were full of beautiful production art from their classic films, likely in honor of their 100th anniversary. Very friendly staff, at least when they didn’t mistake me for a gate-crasher. Felt a bit Disneyland-ish even “behind the scenes.” I suppose they dress it up nicely for the occasional guests and Hollywood execs, and at least to some degree the employees really do seem like sincere Disney lovers. Guess they have to be to work there.

      Fixed my politics over the past decade, too. I recall dumping some bracingly awful contributions to the “Hot Topics” et al threads around here; rest assured I’ve read some books since then. What the heck are you supposed to know as a kid? Plenty, I guess, if you’re a precocious MuseBlogger, which I was not.

      To Robert and the rest: thank you for putting up with me in my underdeveloped years. There’s some stuff that can hurt to remember, and I tend to recall the negatives, but I can’t say there weren’t fun times. I’m not a famous scientist or artist or assistant professor or anything, but I’m pretty happy with the person I am now, and my time here surely had something to do with who I am today, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what. And thanks again, Robert, for keeping the lights on around here. See y’all next time! :idea:

      Pie 2
      Squid 0

  • 10

    You can call me "Fitzy"

    in January 25th, 2024 @ 01:56

    I was never a user of this site. Never a user of any blogs or forums on the internet really. Never got the hang of the social internet, and ADD means out of sight and out of mind is a barrier to these sorts of things. I’m doing homework for a college course on evolution and a memory resurfaces. A print-from-home trading card game called Phylo(mon). A short web search later brings me to why I know about this game: Muse magazine wrote about it. They even published a deck (called the Musemon deck) with original art from readers, still downloadable from the Phylo(mon) website.

    I really liked Muse as a kid. I loved their articles, the themes, and the goofy characters that accented the magazine. I loved the in-jokes that I was too young to have seen begin (though I remember a letter to Crraw explaining how “orange” and “door-hinge” rhyme). I was there in 2015 when the Muses were phased out of the magazine, and the final fan letter pages were filled with adult fans in the spotlight. Mostly I remember reading and rereading those magazines in my collection, devouring every page in a simpler time in my life.

    The magazine is still in print? But it was never the same after the Muses left. I wasn’t enjoying it as much, and I stopped requesting renewals. But now I’m here. Visiting the quiet forums of a fanbase I never really interacted with but considered myself a part of. Mourning the loss of something I valued and the seeming inaccessibility of it even with the miracle of the internet.

    Still, it’s cathartic to see how long people stayed active and in touch. I think I’m here to say thank you. I see you. I’m glad you were here. I’m glad I can feel connected to you, strangers, over something we shared for a time. I hope you are all doing well, and I hope the artists and the writers and the editors who brought me a lot of joy and who influenced so much love of the subjects I study even today know in some way that I loved their work and am glad they were a part of my childhood.

    I’ll try to keep my eye on this page in case anyone else sees it. To the hypothetical you who is reading; So long, and thanks for all the pies/pranks/factoids/software/hardware/rhymes/doughnuts/friends/stars/chases/HPBs! I’ll see y’all when we get the collective signal from intelligent air, and world domination conspiracy finally comes to fruition.

    Pie 0
    Squid 0

  • 11

    Piggy

    in January 30th, 2024 @ 09:46

    Hello friends! I’ve been trying to think of something meaningful to say for the last couple weeks, but nothing quoteworthy has come to mind. When people drop by, it feels like a high school reunion in a dark, quiet gymnasium, just one or two people at a time stepping inside, paying their autobiographical dues, and heading back outside to the light of their their busy lives again. I’ve been sitting here by the punch table this whole time, and I’m so glad to see you guys again–although I suspect you’ve driven away already. Robert must have ducked into the restroom or something, because I haven’t seen him lately either. I hope your lives continue to grow, despite or thanks to nervous breakdowns and lymphomas.

    To keep the book conversation up-to-date, the pile I have on my desk next to me currently are, from bottom to top: the collected poetry of Robert Frost; Ted Kooser’s Kindest Regards and The Poetry Home Repair Manual; Loup River Psalter by William Kloefkorn; and Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. Guiltily, I see the outsides more than the insides.

    Pie 3
    Squid 0

    • 11.1

      You can call me "Fitzy"

      in February 4th, 2024 @ 17:35

      I sent a post a few weeks back, but I don’t think it was approved. I stumbled across this place a few weeks ago and did some brief digging into it. It seems like a nice community. I hope y’all are doing well.

      Pie 0
      Squid 0

      • 11.1.1

        Robert Coontz (Administrator)

        in March 24th, 2024 @ 16:48

        Sorry about that! We were besieged by spambots and had to do a lot of preliminary moderating before we could even see your posts. Welcome!

        Pie 0
        Squid 0

  • 12

    Sinusoidal Polyglot

    in February 18th, 2024 @ 15:04

    Hi! Sinusoidal here! This is my first post on MuseBlog. I come from ChatterBox (See my posts there). If I’m not supposed to give my email, why is it required? Anyone up to talk about particle physics and the mass of a photon? I’ve heard that MB is like CB but for STEM.

    Pie 0
    Squid 0

  • 13

    Sinusoidal

    in February 18th, 2024 @ 15:07

    Can someone create a guide on how MB works and how to use it and post and all that? What are the kinds of topics MB talks about?

    Pie 0
    Squid 0

  • 14

    Cat's Eye

    in March 8th, 2024 @ 17:00

    Hello, all!

    I’ve had a busy few years since I last dropped in – published a book, wrote a sequel, endured a few rounds of COVID, and got top surgery! I’m still living in NYC – this last September marked my ten-year anniversary – and I’ve done some traveling recently: Edinburgh, Montreal, New Hampshire, Denver, and next month a drive up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Memphis.

    Publishing a book was wonderful in some ways, but very, very stressful in others. My publishing house is not particularly well-managed right now and I got the brunt of a lot of staff turnover. But I’m still very proud of the book, and some people seemed to really love it. I’m hoping that the publisher will put in the effort to set up a few events in new cities when the sequel’s published, though my hopes aren’t high.

    I spend a lot of time with friends, but I do find myself taking most of my pleasure in reading these days in a way that I haven’t since I was younger, which is nice. I find myself really hungry these days for anything that helps me have long, slow thoughts, rather than snap judgments. I also read Life on the Mississippi recently, as a matter of fact! I was really moved by Twain’s description of the death of his brother, and the guilt he carries around it, and I was really amused by the way he talks about Walter Scott – I’d always been a little skeptical of his reaction to Arthuriana in Connecticut Yankee, and this really helped put his feelings in context. Now I’m reading Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World by Thomas C. Buchanan, which is really fascinating, and really makes me see how little about American slavery I’d read after leaving high school, and how much more I’d like to learn. All of this is meant to be pre-research for next month’s road trip, of course, though whether I can mentally connect the sights and sounds in Twain and Buchanan to the sights and sounds of 2024 remains to be seen.

    I’m also reading Joan Didion for the first time. I love and hate it when I finally read someone whose prose I keep hearing about, and their prose really is that good – the stuff itself is one of the great joys, and then again, I get annoyed at myself for avoiding that writer up to this point for no reason at all! But as a matter of fact I finally came to her because she was recommended to me specifically as someone who would remind me of Joseph Mitchell, whose collection of essays Up in the Old Hotel I’d just read, and who became one of my favorite writers of all time in a matter of weeks. His writing is life-changing for me – it’s so patient, it’s so curious, and it’s so passionately in love with the world and with people. I’d reread Diane Duane’s Young Wizards while I was recovering from surgery, the scene where the heroes read from a book that names the world (and New York in particular) exactly as it is so beautifully and truly that it becomes more of itself, that it remembers how to be itself, and his descriptions of New York Harbor are the closest I’ve seen anything come to being that in real life. And he names his favorite book as Life on the Mississippi, so I suppose it all comes full circle!

    Pie 0
    Squid 0

    • 14.1

      Robert Coontz (Administrator)

      in March 24th, 2024 @ 17:00

      Welcome back, Cat’s Eye, and thank you for the fascinating update. (Fun factoid related to Life on the Mississippi: as Piggy noted, my great-great-grandfather Benton Coontz makes a brief but pivotal appearance in chapter 56.)

      Pie 0
      Squid 0

Leave a comment