So, Two Page Tuesday #1
happened, and it was fucking marvelous. Although one of the readers
unfortunately couldn’t make it in the end, we had two folks agree to step in
(one of whom I’d never even met before), and the readings were all super
different and super excellent (which was the hope, the goal). We had I think
twenty people show up, which was great, and then there was plenty of
discussion, revelry, and general merry-making both before and after (which, too,
was the hope, the goal). I could not have been happier with it; I’m buzzing a
little just thinking about it.
This is not a post about that, though. This is a post about a stupid website,
twopagetuesday.club.
I’d had a lot of momentum earlier in the year for building out a site for the
readings and social events in Django, the web
framework we use at work. I’d previously written Alia’s bakery website in
Flask,
but I had grown rather fond of the "batteries included" admin views you get out
of the box. I also figured, at the time, that it would be good for me to
practice, because, you know, "work" and "professional development." Turned out
that I instead spent much of the early part of this year writing a different
Django app for work, and so did not want to then spend the rest of my time
working on, you know, another Django app.
But the reading went so well, I thought: hey, let’s have a fucking website.
And the idea was a good one: I could use the admin views to manage the events,
the locations, the readers, and — most importantly — the email list. Because
you see, right now, it’s just a very long BCC string that I copy from email to
email. This is no fun! Or rather, it’s very error prone. So I
was going to do a "real" mailing list.
What had given me new energy, also, was that my fancy new
webhost
changed their pricing recently, and I could have sworn I read that you could
get Postgresql backends for basically free now (you need this as a database for
your Django app), so I thought: great, let’s get going.
So I spent maybe the last week, week and a half, building out the website.
The longest part of this is always the design part for me. And let’s be honest:
it doesn’t look bad, but it’s not particularly great either. I don’t think
the colors actually mean anything in this context, but hey: I needed something
and I got it done.
I was all set to deploy earlier today, when I went to go set it all up and
realized: fucking hell, I do need to pay for this shit after all! Bummer,
bummer. What am I to do? Pay $7/month indefinitely? No thank you.
And here’s the rub: what I actually needed the backend database for was to
keep a record of the emails for the mailing list. It was going to be fun to
"roll my own" and all of that. But I can… also just keep sending emails from my
personal email address. I can also make an "organization" email address. Fuck, I
can even get an email address through Dreamhost for $2/month and just automate
things that way. Or even better, I can do what I’d always threatened to do and
make these announcements solely via snail mail.
So I spent about an hour over lunch reworking the site into a plain-Jane
Jekyll site, same as this one, and shot it over to
Render as yet another very-free static site.
Was all the Django work wasted effort? Eh, yes and no. Mostly no, since I was
able to use all the "hard parts" (i.e., the design) in the static site. And
writing models as simple as the ones I was writing is trivial enough. So, we’ll
call it "practice" and ask my boss for a raise next year.
At best I get around to writing something for this blog like, what, once a
month? Less? I suppose it depends on the year and season. And now, for example,
it’s mostly "bike season," which means that I’m spending less not-work time at
the ol' text editor and more time looking at bike parts on the
internet (I mean: riding my bike). Still. Though I can’t seem to get my shit
together to actually get any of these written down, I do occasionally still have
ideas, and as a deeply lazy way of getting them off my brain-plate, here are
some of them:
-
I am not prepared for brevet season but I am excited nonetheless
-
Rewriting my desk setup, and rewriting it again, to foil the cable-chewing
kitten
-
Mildly-Instagram-famous person spotted at local bar, Danny is not sure whether
to say hi or not, decides not to, regrets this later
-
Two Page Tuesday, results
-
Why it’s important to understand what you’re buying (an unpublishable letter)
-
I think I like rust (the language, not on my bike)
-
[redacted]
-
Tmux → Zellij and relearning keymaps
-
400k in < 18 hours, or: following Tom’s wheel
-
A time for rest and relaxation
Of that last one, perhaps it’s worth saying a little more, namely that I was
fucking tired, in a global way, in a cumulative-load kind of way, by the end
of this spring. I was sick for like two weeks in March, and then we were either
hosting guests or traveling nearly every week and/or weekend, and work was busy,
and I was trying to flog myself into some kind of catch-up shape for the bike
season, and a number of other small, niggling things, that finally caught up to
me (for, as is often pointed out: I am no longer in my early twenties). So I
have been resting, focusing on relaxing, in other words recovering, and it has
been so nice. It means that I’ve done less than maybe I could
have, and
though it’s taken a good month and a half or so, I’m starting to feel more
myself again, starting to have energy to chase any attractive-looking car that
passes by the yard (in this metaphor I am a dog), and it’s nice. I’m still
feeling a little fuzz-brained, at times, and I’m not always as immediately
articulate as I’d like to be, but hey: like writing a novel, like riding your
bike for a long time, it’s a process.
And thus, instead of anything actually interesting to read, we have a list of
things that might have been interesting to write about instead.
May it not be the last!
It’s going to be a reading!
Except it’s mostly a social thing,
by which I mean that it’s going to be a very
short reading. And then, if my very nefarious plan works out, people will
stick around, talk to each other, maybe meet some new people, maybe have a nice
time. I don’t even really give a fuck if anybody talks about writing or books or
anything (I mean: I give a fuck that they appreciate the readers, of course.
You’ve always got to give props to the readers).
I’ve been sort of haphazardly "piloting" a writer/lit folks meet up or social
thing since January, and this is a step towards creating some kind of
formalization around it. I like the idea of
keeping the non-reading weeks/months (timeline, schedule, cadence, etc.,
horrifically TBD) casual, smaller, whatever, but I also want to throw a good,
big-tent kind of party. I struggle with this generally, the opposing impulses of
bringing people together intentionally (viz who it is that I’m bringing
together) and the bringing together of everyone I can find, harangue, meet by
accident. This is going to be an attempt at a kind of balance.
We’re doing it at the Banshee because
a long time ago I used to work for/run an organization called Write on the
DOT and they’d let us do open mics there for
free. The
Banshee also used to be our "program bar" in grad school, where we would go
after workshop. It’s a good
place! Not cheap, exactly, but if you know what to drink (Narragansett) you’ll
be OK, and the food is pretty good. It’s also partly a thank-you to all the DOT
folks who’ve been generous enough to come to my side of the river to hang out
these last few months.
We’ve got some great readers — six of them. The deal, also, is that they have
to (I mean "get to") read up to two pages (double spaced) of new work. So
it’ll be fresh shit. It’ll also be a pretty short reading, because long readings
are long and I want it to primarily be about community — you share a little
bit, but mostly you ask about how work is going and what TV you’ve been
watching.
Anyway, I hope people show up. I’ve emailed some of the local grad programs and
the local literary event aggregator and I’m posting this here, and on what
little social media I have left, so. But hell: even if it’s just me and the six
readers, we’ll have a good time.
(But also: please come. It’ll be fun, I can basically promise.)