titles as signposts
I've been moving my old TFR (The Free Radical) posts from their MacBook Air archive up to a new folder on my lloydnebres.net domain, so that these daily pages might live online again. The original machines serving l.editthispage.com up had gone dark/quiet long ago, in the early 'teens. My gratitude to Dave Winer and co. is permanent, abiding.
Been intentionally doing them one by one so that I can relive the flow of it, back when I started it in the spring and early summer of the first year of the new millennium, 2000. Well, I'm batch-uploading them by year, but I've been going through each separate .html doc and manually uploading those embedded images that many of the pages have, as well as doing minor edits to the HTML such that the links are correct, and the images show up fine online, like this. [My thanks to Rob of the Polyphonic Cognitive Ensemble for the coding and BBEdit grepping help!]
And what I see of my titling conventions is both familiar and new - familiar in the sense of recognizing my penchant (which remains to this day) for using lower-case ee cummings-style titles (like here in this very blog; but also a new sense, realizing that certain titles stand out as cognitive and experiential signposts on those days, months, and years.
September 1, 2000's post - september rain, berkeley hills - is a good example. It's pensive and lyrical, starts out 'qualic' and sinks into memory and memories, and ends (later that afternoon) in a gesture to the online world me and my summer students - already scattered to the four winds of fall and their regular academic year - had begun to live in, to varying degrees of intensity and intention. Which is a long-winded way of asserting: that post is as ideal an artifact of that time as there was.
Ten days later, we have the psycho-spiritual signpost of finding your inner rat, a cheeky advice-mongering moment from a mentor to his mentees. ::chuckle:: There is, after all, technology in it (the architecture and structure of our weblogging space and community) as well as transmogrification (a citation of the death and reincarnation of a mentee's weblog). This is also an excellent example of a post that marks very well the tenor of our times then, and remarks upon it in ways both glancing and direct.
And so it goes. So it went. And so it is going... I am only on month 5 of a whole 10-year era in my life, one which will contain many sagas and serendipities, much insight in recapitulation as well as the confusion of the lived moments written down and captured - at times elegantly, other times clumsily, but always with presence - for posterity.
[ As I'm writing tangentially about time, here are 4 captured moments from the random Lock Screen image function on my iPhone... I wonder what makes the iOS algo decide when to lay the digits in the background, or the foreground. ]
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