I spent last night reviving my old “notes blog”, intended for posts that feel too light for my main blog, but don’t feel quite appropriate for writing directly on social media, either. I started it as a lockdown project in mid-2020, and pursued it enthusiastically for only a few months thereafter. Something about the present environment moves me to return to it.

This blog launched with the name Jots, Scraps, and Tailings, but I’ve renamed it to ‘Twas This, after a panel in a Jim Woodring comic book. The name struck me while I walked around last night after making my first new post in several years, and successfully POSSE-ing it to Mastodon and Bluesky, neither of which existed back in 2020. It seems an apt title for a self-publication where I might not always hold myself to my usual standards of length or flow.

There remains an RSS feed, whose link you can find elsewhere on this page. I do intend to POSSE all my posts to social media, and then have interactions there show up here, by way of Brid.gy and Whim.

I wish there was an ACK symbol in the Unicode emoji set, for slapping a “I receive and comprehend your message” reaction on a text. “👍” implies more assent or agreement than I necessarily want, and “🆗” often seems sarcastic outside of certain specific contexts.

Hello, what’s this: ␆ Why, it’s Unicode symbol U+2406, “SYMBOL FOR ACKNOWLEDGE”. Gee, not very legible in most typefaces, is it. When I just now texted it to a friend, they read it as a somewhat misshapen 💤 emoji. On my Mac it renders as a microscopic, horizontally arranged “ACK”, like Cathy might emit if she just fell down a well.

No matter! It’s going right in my Character Viewer favorites list, which I didn’t know I had, and which only has one other thing on it, which is ★, U+272D “BLACK STAR”, and which I bet I “favorited” in January 2016.

“Hello. My name is Jason. I like to be called jmac. Any pronouns. Standard time.”

For a variety of reasons, I slowly come to comprehend a growing personal conviction that only professional drivers should operate motor vehicles.

But that I could drive a wooden stake through the oily heart of every privately owned engine block. I would, I would.

The rise in Black American voices, year by year, shifts and widens the message-legacy of MLK. I think it helps me understand the historical Jesus a little better.

Both of these men were subtle but radical revolutionaries who freaked out the powers they spoke truth to. Both died young for it. And both had their legacies claimed, subverted, and simplified by the powers that rose after their deaths.

But no amount of cherry-picking erases the whole of their recorded work. The truth of it remains for all with the attention to spare for it.

I plan to attend this Wednesday’s IndieWeb U.S. meetup. It’s been many months since the last time I did anything like this, and I look forward to talking about the independent, open web with knowledgable folks again.

I have officially retired The Rolandizer, a silly bit of CSS that I wrote in 2014. It transformed one’s Twitter timeline into an experience not at all similar to reading the 11th century epic poem The Song of Roland, other than the insertion at apparently random intervals of the poem’s mysterious trigram “AOI”.

Naturally, this stopped working some years after that. The Rolandizer depended on Twitter using HTML in a certain way, and when it finally changed the way that it renders tweets, it ended this project’s silly song. Thus, I set its Github repository to read-only.

For obscure reasons, I spent a couple of hours today seeing if I could make it work again with today’s Twitter. I did get some approximation off the ground, but the joke just doesn’t land as well in 2020 as it did six years ago. Back then, one’s Twitter timeline was still largely little snatches of text, one after the other, with an occasional static illustration. Today it’s a multimedia extravaganza, and the Rolandizer gag—even when it does work—just looks like weird noise instead of a fun, occasional surprise to break up the rhythm of one little tweet after another.

It was a project of its time, and I’m glad that it worked for a while. AOI.

I enjoyed this tweet as much as anyone on Saturday, after the big news came down, and it has come to mind quite a bit since.

One is initially shocked by this reporter’s response to an inane question, asked in transparently bad faith by a rando who wanted only to waste his time. But in about as much time as it takes for the reporter to turn back around, we feel struck by the perfection of those two words. (The reporter seems to go through a similar journey in that moment, his candid smile suggesting both surprise and relief.)

This will be all I’ll have to say to anyone proposing to commence political head-games with me, for the foreseeable future. There’s just too much work to do. These people don’t deserve any response requiring even a half-second more attention than that reporter so masterfully demonstrates here.

Long Island:

Check-out this Trump supporter trolling the media after the Biden/Harris win.

Reporters aren’t taking it anymore and I’m here for every last bit of it… pic.twitter.com/c21yEbr4mN

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) November 7, 2020

Trump-supporting ordinary citizens, however misguided, must accompany the rest of us into the brighter future that just became a little more possible. Let them vote against that future, again and again, and find only defeat and disappointment. Each loss will make life a little better for themselves and their families, even as they resent the notion of life improving for other families too. All of this works only if it works for everyone, so along they come, whether they like it or not.

Trump-supporting political actors, on the other hand, are anathema to the human species’ future. They deserve nothing but shunning and scorn. Nobody with a reputation to maintain should associate with or hire them, for any role: not a cabinet job, not a teaching gig, not a parking lot attendant down at the Safeway. Fill all these positions with anyone except for Americans who, granted with political power, bent it towards selfish, hateful, destructive ends. Let them spend the rest of their days mired in regret, those of them with enough heart left to feel anything.

During my 2018 summer vacation in London, I learned that one way Brits famously relish their beer while avoiding excess is through small glasses. Just about every pub or café I visited prominently listed prices for small and large sizes across all its taps. How different from America, where beer purchased in public generally comes only in big old pint glasses (or larger).

And I quickly discovered how much I liked this foreign arrangement! To be more specific, I discovered that when I felt like a beer, I often just want some: enough for a refreshing loosen-up, but not the filling, firm twist that a whole pint offers. I did miss the English style of unabashed half-pints when I returned to familiar shores.

Since then, the pandemic has taken the pubs away from me entirely, but I have discovered a marvelous method for simulating British serving styles when enjoying beer at home. When I open a bottle of Lagunitas or whatnot, I now often eschew my pint-glass collection and reach for a small glass to fill up instead. And then, having done so, I stop the bottle with a bottle-stopper — the sort of thing one generally associates with wine bottles, you see — and replace it in the fridge. This remainder shall accompany some future lunch.

And that’s it! I truly feel like I’ve discovered a new way to enjoy beer. The bottle’s design, to say nothing of the culture surrounding it, do not make clear that you don’t need to drink the whole beer, especially if you’re a grown-up fixing a meal or snack in your own kitchen. I feel like I’ve found a new and more personable side of beer, by having less of it at once.