More Reasons to Become God

Part One

There's a photograph, of a particular woman, sitting on a cold beach in an oversized sweater (hugging her knees, I think), and she has this really lovely melancholy smile. 

The last time I went to look at it, someone had switched it with another.

I haven't had cause to feel that emotion myself in a very long time - which is good - but in no longer having access to that image, my life is made a little smaller, and a little stupider.

...

There's more to be said about curation, creation, balancing reliability with variety, infinite galleries, and sooner or later attaining access to the full archive, but whatever governs my brain on this is resisting, so it will wait.

curious traffic increase

Anyone happen to know why my blog has been suddenly popular in Brazil, Singapore, and Vietnam?

[Edit, Aug 12: Total traffic level jumped up a magnitude. Seems to be the same posts getting hits as before. /Edit]

timeless

I wore a swimsuit for 40 of 66 hours

And when I wasn't asleep or swimming, I was on my feet

Now I am returned

Doing nothing

Swimming (and paddle boarding) was better

What, besides sit in front of a screen or bar, do people DO between 6pm and 10pm?

Is it something I forgot, or have as yet failed to invent?

Cephalumps and Woozles

There was a time when I knew, then forgot, that the reason the titular story manifested Cthulhu as a gooey blob, with tendrils down its face, is because the phrase

"Ia Ia Cthulhu Ftagn"

can also be transliterated as 

"ah Ah CHOO" (blows nose brassily)

and this may have happened more than once.

Awareness of context, clarity of purpose, and clarity of thought rarely seem to coincide. 

Distractibility, chaotic records, and the survivorship fallacy I guess. Like pineapple and jolly ranchers, TV eats you back.

...

This is not a return to old hobbies and diversions. I have more complicated observations about progress, milestones and timelines, but I am unable to articulate them succinctly tonight.

More Cleaning

If I ever pick coding back up, I should:

• rebuild my "History of BattleTech" chart to be dynamic and interactive;
• make a widget which scrapes my blog & then graphs my posting activity over time (I guess similar to the visitor activity graph that's already on the back end);
• figure a way to refactor all these labels;
• get the archive widget to highlight relevant entries when a "search:label" page is up [Edit, July 3rd: and maybe show how many comments each has /Edit];
• and make some sort of corkboard viewer for email or message chains, to trace the flow of ideas better. Existing formats (including forum threading, forking and other tricks) aren't totally adequate.

More Blogs Removed:

Housecleaning

Planet Stuff:

• Planet Sizes and Tilts - (graphic) 
• orbital inclinations (graph, lost it)
• Orbital Distances - (charts)
• Solar Barycenter - (animation)
• Asteroid Belt - (animation)
• Colors of the Planets - (chart, inaccurate) 
• NASA Planetary Fact Sheet - (table)
• [July 4 Edit: Entire Universe in Log Scale /Edit]

Podcasts Removed and Stashed Here:

Comments

• Still unable to comment on my own posts. Verification appears bugged. 
• Your comments are up now. That's on me. I will probably continue to be slow on that. 
• Browsing to your blogs, my browser seems  confused about which version (desktop or mobile) is being displayed. 

[Update, June 19: attempting to comment on my own blog, failing, and then following a link in my post takes me not to the linked page but to the HTML of the linked page. /Update]

• Fun(?) Fact: Google's product landing page does not link to its products on the first screen. Zipping halfway down the page doesn't reach a product list either. 
• I use youtube help pages to reach my youtube comment history because the normal links are broken or bugged and my comment history is literally inaccessible any other way.