This blog began in 2017 during the generous downtime afforded by a job selling advertisements at a small local newspaper in northern Wisconsin. It was the spiritual successor to a prior blog called “pandnotp,” a (lame) logic pun, which itself was modeled a lot on Daring Fireball. There was a travel blog in between these two, also, but I don’t really know where most of that went.

Over time it’s become my “main” blog, and lately it’s been my primary presence on the internet, given that I’ve slimmed down both my web hosting and domain name purchases and am not so often on social media (though I am giving Bluesky a try; on all other platforms I am “@delfanbaum”).

My name is Danny and I’m from St. Louis but now live in a town near Boston called Belmont (it’s somewhat fancy, if chronically about to run out of money (what you get for being a “town of homes” with no commercial tax base); I am not fancy but anyway am lucky to live there). My wife and I take care of a couple of gray cats whose names are George and Moth.

Because I like books, riding bikes, and bullshitting, we get the name. I also do other things, like writing fiction and code, and you can look at some of that if you’re interested over on the work page.

I work as a “publishing tools developer” at a technology publisher (you know the one: we publish the “animal books”). I have also worked at proper software companies, bike shops, the aforementioned small town newspaper, and other odd jobs and ends. I have an MFA in Fiction (“a masters degree in lies”), and for a while I put together a literary journal called Response, which I was and still am very proud of. Now that energy is focused more on a reading series/literary folks social thing that is working its way off the ground called Two Page Tuesday.

Colophon

This (static) site is built on Jekyll, because it’s easy and great and I don’t have to pay for hosting if it’s just a static site. Yes, it’s slower than Hugo, but I also don’t want to have to if err != nil {} everything (this is a programming joke, I’m sorry). And the builds are all CI now a-days anyway.

The posts are written in either Markdown or Asciidoc. I prefer the latter, but sometimes Markdown is just easier out-of-the-box with Jekyll. If something is broken, find a way to contact me and I’ll fix it.

The font is IBM Plex, which is also what I use in my personal life. Sure, it’s a little ugly so far as a blog goes, but it has very Web 1.0 “vibes” which I like, and it’s my party anyway.

The site hosted on Render, and I bought the domain through Dreamhost, which I wish hadn’t made it so hard to host web apps.

Made with love and neovim.